Advantages

[arctic]

it is all about tastes. i prefer my gnome and mac desktops. :P

[fangbite]

I think another good thing about madrake, mandriva etc, is that they have a multitude of desktops while other distros sometimes don't. On Mandrake 10.1 OE, I tried out at least five of them. I stuck with kde because thats the kind of system I like. Gnome has always seemed so blah in my eyes. But again, a desktop is like linux, find your own, then get in bar fights with people who use anything else.

[Guest Sophgoat]

I actually got started with GNU/Linux after reading "Cryptonimicon" by Neal Stephenson, and then "In the beginning was the command line." All of a sudden, I realized that if I wanted I could have a lot more power and influence over this tool I was using on a regular basis.

 

I started with 8.2 because that and Red Hat were the only two choices at Staples. This was two years ago, I think - maybe three? I had no clue what I was doing other than hoping to stick it to Microsoft, to which I felt wrongly tied.

 

So my whole goal with GNU/Linux has been to break free of Windows for purely political and ethical reasons. I'm not a geek, although I've borked many a computer in the past two years trying to become one. I needed a distro that would install readily and then let me do my thing which is basically write, listen to music, send emails and read news online. Simple.

 

But I like lots of choices in terms of packages - which is important to me - and I like/need functionality. I've also tried Debian, Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu and Mepis for my main distro and none of them offered the same variety while simultaneously offering ease of install and maintenance.

 

My sense of Mandriva has always been that you can geek out on it, or you can be Aunt Alice.

 

The other advantage is that I find this board and community to be the most helpful of the few I've perused. Debian is a great distro - I still play with it on my basement box and think about taking it upstairs - but I found the Debian help and community to be a little less welcoming, a little more technical and unwilling to welcome newbies. I've been searching the archives here and occasionally posting for quite a while, and it's been a huge help. When I recommend Mandriva to folks, I always send them here as well.

[Phantom]

I have tested Linux every year or so to see where it was and if it was ready for the desktop, each time I tested Mandrake along with Redhat, Suse and some other distro's.

 

Altough other distro's seem better for servers, Mandrake has always been my first choise for the desktop.

 

Even this, and now I'm 100% M$ free, my choice went to Mandrake, after testing Mephis, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Suse.

 

Why?

 

Ubuntu: gave me to many problems with my video card, laptop tools and VMware5 and Gnome isn't what I expect from a desktop env.

 

Kubuntu: It just wasn't stable, KDE kept on crashing and the same problems as Ubuntu on top of it.

 

Suse: If I'm going GNU/Linux then I want to do correctly, Suse is turning into the M$ of the Linux world, way to commercial for me. Altough Mandrake has commercial version also I prefer their commercial strategy, the Club is a marvelous idea. And if you don't have the $$$ then you can still run the free version, not like Suse where you can do it but only with the older versions.

 

I tried Fedora but it wouldn't install on my latop.

 

Even if I wasn't happy with Ubuntu my wife loves it, it remebers her of her Amiga yeaaaaaaaars ago, and it runs perfectly well on her laptop.

 

I tried also a live cd of Linspire, but no thanks, that looks just like WinXP with a new skin, and it's way to commercial for me.

 

And don't take me wrong with the commercial remarks, I just bought for over 200$ stuff from Mandriva, so I do support the Linux community with my €€€ ;)

[scarecrow]

Had been using Mandrake for years. Last September I discovered a distro which was tailor made for my needs (Arch Linux), and two days ago I kicked out my spare Mandriva installation in favour of the new Kanotix 2005.3, which should be the best Debian spinoff I ever test drived (needless to say that Ubuntu/Kubuntu are a few ages behind the buggiest Sid wrap that exists).

[Havin_it]

Gnomes are closely related to trolls, you know.

 

Why Mandrake? Folks said it was a good place to start. Guess they were right, since I live on the third floor and the PC has not yet made the descent by 'express elevator'.

[polemicz]

Started with Mandrake 8.1 after deciding to go with it vs Red Hat and Suse, mainly because of the ease of installation and my newness to Linux. I have subsequently tried Red Hat (various from 8 onwards, and Fedora) as well as Suse. I have never been able to like Red Hat/Fedora as a matter of taste and my ease in working with Mandrake/Mandriva always had me going back. I also am a KDE person (preference and loathing of Nautilus). Suse always turned me off. It worked ok out of the box, but I felt constrained by it. I have been a happy user of Debian Sarge for some time and have tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, but don't feel "at home" with them. Also when I tried Kubuntu it was an awful buggy mess. I stay with Mandriva as I know my way around its quirks and am comfortable in its configuration tools. So why change! If I were it would be to pure Debian. Sarge is ever so nice and in 6 months testing will also be pretty stable.

[DragonMage]

For me, a few reasons:

 

1. Availability for reasonable price. Since Internet bandwidth in Indonesia is pitiful (not to mention expensive), there are pretty much only a couple of distros that you can get for under 5 dollars including the guide book. Those are Fedora Core, Mandrake, and Slackware. Among these, Mandrake is the most complete.

 

2. Time. I just don't have time anymore to distro hop. In fact, I just ended my Mandriva 2005 LE x86_64 bit trial because I just don't have the time to download everything I need from the net and tweak them to what's usable for me. So I changed back to 10.1 for my desktop.

 

3. Familiarity. I can teach people how to use Mandrake easily because I am familiar with it and its quirks. So I can always find ways to work around it whenever there are problems.