When I optimistically downloaded the 690MB ISO file from Mandriva’s website, I had high hopes that this version would improve the steadily degrading once immensely popular GNU/Linux distribution.

When I went Linux for good, my first distro was Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Free. It was a brilliant distro, and given the choice I would run it even today. I have many happy memories with it, discovering, mixing and matching applications and designing my desktop the way I wanted to, never for once missing the the comfortable home provided by Windows.

2009.0 was good, but nothing to write home about, as was 2009.1. Cut to 2010.0 and Mandriva began to take the shape of my worst nightmares.

2010.1 does nothing to improve on it.

First of all, let me bring to your attention that Mandriva SA is going through a huge crisis. We can excuse them to some extent due to this, and thus I’m not going to be too harsh on them. However, take note of the following:
 
    * Mandriva One, the version with all the proprietary hardware drivers and multimedia support included out of the box, has no 64-bit version.
    * None of Mandriva’s Kernels have PAE support, except the Server kernel.
    * The Server kernel is not pre-emptible, and thus performance is rather degraded. Additional, it includes built-in Xen support, thus effectively removing all support for the NVIDIA binary drivers (The two don’t play nice with each other).
    * The Multimedia kernels have himem support up-to 4GB, but suffers from the 32-bit Memory Hole problem between the 3GB and 4GB address space.

This is a huge problem for me, because I have 4GB of RAM, and I’m not happy with only 3.2GB of it being usable. Mandriva Free does have a 64-bit version, but it’s a DVD and it’s a lot of work to set, up, too. Their excuse for lack of a 64-bit version for One? Too much work! Have a look here: http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=98720. Can you believe this?

So I was forced to download a 32bit version of the KDE release and give it a spin - in Oracle xVM VirtualBox. Here’s what I found.

The distro in itself is quite established, with the Drak set of tools managing the start-up and installation of the live CD. Mandriva uses Plymouth to boot, but unlike other distros when no KMS support is available Plymouth uses a VESA Framebuffer rather than falling back to Text-Mode with scary progress bars in ghastly colours - Kudos to them for that. I loved that feature.

On the other hand, booting the LiveCD took a fair amount of time. Once booted, X started up and asked me for details about my Time Zone and Keymap. I supplied the lot, and was taken straight to the KDE desktop.
 
The desktop in One looks far better than the desktop in Free. The wallpaper is suave, in a shade of light blue with a glassy leaf on the right side. Even then, the desktop defaults to the KDE3-like folder view mode rather than the “Desktop Activity” - which is the mode where you get all those cool Plasmoids. While in Free this would have looked utterly horrendous, in One this is passable. Indeed, Mandriva tries to emulate KDE3 as far as possible to provide a comfortable base for KDE3 users to switch over to the newer KDE4, and users can slowly enable the new features as they become comfortable with the desktop.
 
The distro sticks to KDE 4.4.3. Upgrading to KDE SC 4.5 is a breeze, however, if you have the Backports repo enabled. It’s worth mentioning that KDE SC 4.5 brings loads of improvements, mostly in stability and security, but also in great new features. However, you won’t get to see all those goodies if you stick to Ia Ora, the default artwork and themes stack for Mandriva.
 
I may cause a flamewar here, but let me tell you, Ia Ora is dated and it’s obnoxious. Mandriva is doing release after release not updating the Ia Ora artwork stack. Most people I know revert back to either Oxygen or Air first thing after installing Mandriva. However, your personal preferences do count, so you may prefer to keep the default look. Hey, the screensaver is the best I’ve seen in any Linux distribution.
 
Let’s get to the serious part - The applications. Everything is pretty standard, including OpenOffice.Org 3 and the KDE 4.4 Application suite. The Linux Kernel is at version 2.6.33.5, which is good, but not excellent, since version 2.6.34 brings in numerous improvements to the KMS and Graphics department which Mandriva is missing out on. Should you want the GNOME version, Gnome 2.30.1 awaits you in all it’s glory, sans the good looks courtesy Ia Ora. Amarok is at version 2.3.1, and The GIMP at version 2.6.8. The nVidia drivers are stuck at 195.36.24, which is a tad disappointing seeing the 256.X series has been available for a long time. Note that to use the latest nVidia Fermi GPUs, you’ll need the 256.X series; I have no idea if it’s available from backports though.
 
One grouse that I have is the Text Anti-Aliasing. Freetype ships with the bytecode interpreter and all the Subpixel magic disabled, due to Mandriva being overly cautious with Patent Infringement stuff. Ubuntu ships with all that stuff enabled, so you know there’s nothing to worry about, and if you’ve been tracking the news you know the patents covering the bytecode interpreter have just expired.

So head to EasyURPMI.zarb.org to add the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) Repos, and type in urpmi --auto-select at a terminal. Your system should be updated with all the latest versions of the software available from the repos, plus a copy of FreeType with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled and more multimedia codecs. You can now enable Anti-Aliasing via the KDE System Center.
 
Well, that’s about it, folks. Check out the screenshots below, for a look at what the distro looks like. However I can’t really recommend this distro, since it suffers from all the inherent problems that Mandriva has been having for the last few releases - General slowness, software bloat and bad looks. Perhaps they’ll improve in the next few releases, because they have great technologies that I just can’t bear going to waste.

Like Mandriva Control Center, for example. It’s a very user friendly distro. It just needs to be a bit leaner, faster and less obnoxious to look at. If you want a heavyweight distro with a general ease-of-use, speed and looks, with a good KDE implementation and the latest software, plus all the proprietary drivers out of the box and um, music playing while the OS boots, I’d recommend going for Sabayon rather than Mandriva. The two fall in the same category, but Sabayon seems to be winning.