Well, now that the Ubuntu 8.04 and derivatives are officially released I must say job well done. I installed Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Mythbuntu and they are pretty good as usual. Thing is, I switched to Mandriva Spring 2008 at work and at home and life has been better!

Hardware support and configuration in Mandriva has been rock solid as is the operating system. One reason I switched from Mandrake years ago is the fact it did not have an updating mechanism that didn't require a payment. This is no longer the case. The other reason was due to the operating system flip flopping from good to bad each release and things breaking as the operating system matured annoyed me. If it worked last release why in the hell would it work in the current?

To do a side by side compare I find Mandriva's only weakness to be it's commercial nature. Mandriva is a consumer product and is treated as such, but they have eased up from earlier releases, most likely a direct result of Ubuntu and Suse competition.

As for non-free drivers and software, even on Ubuntu I loaded all those goodies and could care less if I have that choice. The ATI driver is a must have no matter how shitty it is if you want to game or access all the features of the card. Yes, I need all that non-free crap and I am not ashamed to admit it! I have been installing Linux longer than most of you purists starting with Slackware back in the early nineties so keep that in mind before you make opinions about me or my Linux experience! If you really don't want proprietary stuff download that other Mandriva CD – you have that choice when you download the ISO.

The other thing about Mandriva was the package management. It used to be old school, find the RPM on the net, compile it yourself, or load from either the default or purchasable add on CDs. This meant work trying to find what you needed sometimes, it definitely meant outdated software a lot of the time. Mandriva 2008 uses a system very much like Debian, complete with repositories with all the latest and greatest software. If this wasn't the case I'd most likely be on Debian or Ubuntu 8.04 writing this,

One thing that Mandriva, and Suse for that matter, does well is the configuration interface and security features. They made setting up and managing a firewall a breeze. The configuration panel simply rocks and it works very well. Set the proxy, yes some of us are behind a proxy Canonical, and it works across the system including the software installer. No need to manually configure the proxy my hand for different resources. This is one area where Ubuntu has been very weak. I still have to manually tweak the xorg.conf and why should I at this point in the game?

The big thing for me next to configuration and good hardware support is audio/video. My system doubles as a media center pc so not only do I need to be able to flip between screens, but I need DVD and all that other media greatness. In Ubuntu they have made this fairly easy and Mandriva required no more skill than Ubuntu.

Now that I have said my piece I must state that with choice comes the reality that not one operating system will do for the majority, especially Linux. The great thing about Linux is the choice. Is Mandriva better than Ubuntu? It's for you to decide and the great thing about it is you can try them both, for free. Personally I think Mandriva Spring 2008 is damned good, especially in a big company, and has some niceties over (K)Ubuntu, but that is just my opinion. I will say I'd give my dad, the non-technical user, Mandriva over Ubuntu.

One warning: Mandriva doesn't like new Dell systems – works just doesn't like to shut down...