Linux Review 9- Mandriva KDE 2008.0

Mandriva 2008
Mandriva is the result from after Mandrake. It is what PCLinuxOS is based on. The people behind them have experience, and when they made this OS, they were very careful to provide a good OS, with not many rough edges, and a good overall feature stack. 2008, goes by that, and provides a great Linux experience.

Installing
Installing the 2008 version of Mandriva is very fast. I'd say, if you left for 15 minutes, and then came back, it would be on the "Finished, please halt your computer, and remove the media" screen. It is very very fast. The whole system after is also greatly speedy. Installing graphics drivers is also now a thing of the past for this distribution, Nvidia drivers come pre-installed. That is great, and saves you from looking through repositories for them. Of course you could use Envy, but I have never used that, so somebody remind me to do that. It will probably be review worthy.

Overall Feel
The overall feel is also pretty good, the blue/silver theme is pleasing, it isn't boring, and it strikes the eye, as "That's cool" I think it would be a good thing for a Windows substitute. You also have a choice of initializing 3-d effects, and you can have Metisse, or Compiz, before you even get to Live CD desktop! That's also impressive.

Other Thoughts
Mandriva is free, at least for the one version. You can also upgrade to powerpack, which has more features, and more software. That could be good, or it might not, I am not sure, I know I don't have $50 to spend on it.

Conclusion
Mandriva is a pretty nice distribution. No rough edges, great software, but the Package Manager is very simple.That is the only thing you can really strike it with, other than Personal preference. Installation isn't going to take your afternoon computer time. That's great too. Very cool distribution, I would have to say a 4/5.