The KING has arrived!. Review on Linux Mandrake 9.2

So, we finally have a flavour of linux that is way ahead of its competitors (leave out Suse fr the while). This also happened because of some decisions taken at the Red Hat offices. From Red Hat 9 onwards, they wouldn't support mp3s and mpegs and many other codecs. Now, this is a great setback to the average computer user. And now, Red hat no longer being free, Fedora is out too. But my experiences with Fedora werent very good, of which I will talk in another review.

So here we are, a nice 3 CD set of Mandrake 9.2. The installation was breezy. The mounting of the windows partitions was done by itself, unlike red hat installations. The partition manager is very user friendly. So, not much scope of goofing up, even if you are a newbie. There is a huge collection of softwares bundled with the OS, many of which you can install at the time of OS installation or later, if you wish. It has a number of graphical interfaces like KDE 3.1.3, GNome 2.4.0, Window Maker and IceWM. Open Office was installed.

Now, done with the install process, the OS is booted. A full graphical boot, mind you. I had to download and install the nvidia drivers for my geforce2 card which was a bit complicated but easy if one followed the given instructions. The linux did not recognize my webcam.

My internal modem was succesfully installed. The interface is very user-friendly. Quite similar to Windows, The linux has a K Menu and icons on the task bar. A number of games and multimedia applications were installed. Installing new programs is a breeze with an ''Add Remove'' Option very much like Windows. Needless to say, the OS is very stable. I ran it fr abt a week continuously with a single snag! Imagine doing that in Windows :) I would also like to compare the system resources hogged by similar apps in Windows and Linux. K3B, the burner with linux takes abt 10% of system usage in my computer. Comparethat with Nero, where everything comes to stands still when burning a disc.

MPlayer, a multimedia player, with linux takes 0% resources even while running a full length divx movie!! The only thing that stops me from getting rid of my windows installation and shift full time to linux is the scarcity of games for linux. There are not sufficient ports available. WineX is still not that effective. All in all, Mandrake 9.2 is the best linux flavour at this moment for any windows user to try out. Mandrake 10 is out too, though only on sale.

In the end, I would come back to Suse. Suse is really good but remember, it's not free. Why spend Rs. 2000/- when you can get a product as good for free!