Cool, but No Thanks

Mandriva 2009.0 has been officially released. Like always, Mandriva tried to put the latest bleeding-edge technology/application into their release. As you can see, Mandriva supports almost all the latest version of the technology available nowadays, Kernel 2.6.27, OOo 3.0, Firefox 3, KDe 4.1, GNOME 2.24, and many other things (see here for more detail).

While it's very interesting at the beginning, take a look on their errata page. It contains information on known problems with Mandriva Linux 2009 and, where available, how to fix, avoid or work around them. As you can see, the problem on Mandriva 2009.0 is big enough and sometimes the bug is quite major (my opinion). For experienced users, solving that problem with the description on the errata page is no big deal, but don't expect ordinary users to do something like that.

Some problems are due to usage of beta or RC release of the application included. For example, the Linux kernel 2.6.27 being used has just been released by Linus yesterday and Mandriva has been officially launched around 9 October. This means that the kernel inclusion should be done and finished long before the release. It means that it *might* used RC-8 or RC-9 during the build process. This is something they should have avoided to have stable system.

I have been a fans of Mandriva since i met Linux in 2002, but i moved to Slackware since 2005 up to now. The bad habit of Mandriva developer to put several RC or Beta application is one of the reason. Sometimes, the application is too buggy to be included in the release, but they did.

But i have to admit that Mandriva is one of the coolest Linux distribution i ever tried besides Slackware. It's fancy and very easy to use, especially when using Mandriva Control Panel which should ease your work setting up your system. But when it's about stability, no thanks. I still prefer Slackware for this