Review: Mandriva 2010.1 Spring

Main Screen

Before I do anything else, I want to apologize to readers of this blog (and of Linux Today) as well as to the Mandriva community for giving Mandriva such short shrift in my comparison of KDE distributions for newbies. As I did this test separately (full disclosure: I also wanted to try desktop effects, so Mandriva gets 1 GB of RAM and 128 MB of video memory, while all of the distributions tested on my old computer got 448 MB of RAM and 12 MB of video memory), comparing Mandriva's performance against the others' isn't quite fair, so I won't compare them. My reasoning in the article for not testing Mandriva was that PCLinuxOS uses some Mandriva repositories and tools and seems to support more hardware than Mandriva, so it would be a better contender in the comparison. (It's like why I would choose Linux Mint over Ubuntu in a comparison of GNOME distributions.) Furthermore, Mandriva has been going through a roller-coaster ride of a financial situation of late, so I'm not entirely sure how much longer it will be around in its current incarnation. While the second point still stands, I stand corrected with regard to the first point. Please follow the jump to see why I am so sorry that I chose not to include Mandriva in the last comparison.
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