[LUGSB] Mandriva...Fed 4 on the desktop...

[fitchtom at honestsql.net]

Hi!

I'm a new subscriber.

I just ordered Mandrake Discovery but I was hoping to get some comments on 
my latest experience with Fed 4.

I spent an entire day dedicated to installing and playing with the new 
Redhat Fedora Core 4.

I love RH as a free server OS, especially for hosting.

I'm continously trying to find an acceptable FREE desktop Distro to replace 
XP.  Not just for myself.  My Ultimate Goal is to find something that works 
so well I can replace XP/Win2k in a Small company with No onsite IT staff 
and they would have all of the functionality thety would have with XP.  I 
have two clients that I would love to convert top to bottom and they are 
tired of keeping up with MS licensing.

I used a Compaq Evo P4 1.8 with 512MB of RAM.



This is what I think was good at first glance:

The X windows installation correctly identified my video card and did have 
my monitor listed.  Which is not usually the case with most distros I've 
used.

The new Gnome desktop felt faster than I have previously experienced with 
RH.

The Redhat version of Windowsupdate works awesome finds, sorts out 
dependencies and installs all seamless.

It was easy to install and did find "most" of my hardware and peripherals 
properly including the sound card.


What I didn't like at first glance:

The media player won't play MP3's nor WMA's by default.  You have to hunt 
down and install plugins but I got stuck in the typical file compatibility 
chicken and the egg hell.  This should have been a no brainer for Redhat to 
include a decent player that worked with MP3 and WMA formats.

Being able to browse a Microsoft network and connect to shares and 
drives -out of the box like Turbo10 would have been nice.

It did not find my PCI Linksys Wireless card and would not print to my 
Lexmark printer even though it was installed and found -no error messages 
nothing, print jobs just went into outerspace.

It comes with the Firefox browser which I had heard good things about.  I 
didn't like it at all.  The fonts are all weird, maybe its because too many 
people write their sites to work with IE, but even when you are downloading 
a file it does not give you a status bar, in fact you get no indication 
whatsoever what is going on.  You just have to wait and hope its working 
which is very unnerving indeed.  I'll go back to Opera or Konqueror thank 
you.


The bottom line.

Maybe my expectations were too high.  After using Turbolinux 10 and MS XP, 
its very frustrating to have to force things to work that were previously 
handed to you.

Its free.  I would -and have used it as a server OS.  But for a Desktop OS, 
Not Again.

www.turbolinux.com has a new version of 10 called 10 F that has more 
multimedia functionality.  $69.00  If you want to be able to browsw and 
connect to MS networks immediately out of the box and do not have a laptop, 
in my opinion this is the way to go.

www.mandriva.com has several desktop versions.  Discovery is the one I would 
choose if I wanted some real tech support and all the latest hardware and 
wireless to work or was going to install on a laptop.  Its around the same 
price.

I personally tested Turbolinux 10 and an earlier version of the Mandriva 
distro (aka Mandrake) on a plain desktop in a corporate MS environment.  I 
was extremely impressed with the Turbolinux distro.  -After the updates that 
is, they too have a windowsupdate type application which basically does 
everything for you -as does Mandriva.