[Tfug] Mandriva so far...a serious "Grandma Millie" candidate.

[Jim March]

I'm on Mandriva Free 2007.1 right now.

Very, very nice.  Professionally built, great "feel" to it, the best
GUI-based configuration tools I've ever seen.

Only middling in terms of "bleeding edginess" - kernel is 2.6.17 family for
example.  Initial download has OpenOffice at 2.0.3, updates right away to
2.0.4.  Firefox is still in the 1.5x series.

Switffox was by far the fastest way to get Firefox 2.0.0.2 going, and it
works GREAT.  My laptop has a mediocre video card yet 1400x1050 resolution,
so I'm constantly doing CTRL-roll (the mousewheel) to resize pages and
sometimes it would lag pretty bad.  Swiftfox as compiled specifically for my
Pentium M CPU almost entirely eliminated that.  WAY cool.  It picked up all
my bookmarks/etc. from my original .mozilla folder and still made those
available to FF1.5 which is still there "just in case" Swiftfox pukes - but
so far it's been perfectly well behaved.

OpenOffice 2.1 downloaded and ran fine off the OpenOffice site, and
integrated well with the environment.  Just had to create a desktop
pointer/icon for it, no biggie.  I uninstalled OO2.0 series first.

Other than that, it's just smooth.  It's not going to update the kernel too
radically on me like Fedora did, stability has been 100%, and with a set of
easy-to-follow tweaks at:

http://www.howtoforge.org/the_perfect_desktop_mandriva_free2007

...it was easy to get the basics going: updated repositories, DVD, Flash,
real Acrobat Reader and more.

There's other "Grandma Millie" candidate distros out there, but this one has
advantages in terms of broad package support - something "Grandma Millie"
won't need, but *I* do if I'm going to live with this thing too so I can
support them.

"It's a contenda!"  It's basically everything I liked about Fedora, but less
bleeding-edge and likely to bite now and again.

Jim