Mandrake Linux is perhaps one of the most popular distros, nowadays, and has been my primary desktop, for the last 3 years or more. Mandrake 9.1 had been something I was waiting for, with bated breath and the patience, I must say, has been worth it.

Beginning with the installation, I was a little irritated to see that one had to select *expert* mode from the boot prompt only. My PC somehow refused to boot up with the expert mode install, so I had to make do with the standard options. I didnt miss the power of the traditional Mandrake installer though, notwithstanding the fact that the installer has been considerably simplified. The final summary screen takes the cake and is simply great as it allows u to configure almost__EVERYTHING from one dialog.

As a desktop user, I have always rooted for Mandrake for the awesome gaming performance it delivers, and Quake3 saw an increase of 2 fps with four.dm3 ;) The KDE interface has been considerably enhanced, and the Galaxy theme shows the kind of hard work Everaldo has put in with the Mandrake guys. Mandrake has enhanced KDE3.1 considerably, and it loads in a jiffy on my box. What I love is that font uglification is non-existent with Mandrake 9.1. What irks me however, is that despite all talk of visual coherence betn GNOME and KDE thru Galaxy, GNOME 2.2 hasnt been really taken good care of, by Mandrake. Also file I/O seems to have slowed down with Mandrake 9.1 and that does pinch. Mandrake has finally included k3b with their distro and that is a welcome addition, especially with the capability to burn VCDs (albeit with vcdxgen installed). The PDF Writer with Mandrake is great too, and generates leaner and cleaner PDFs.

The great thing about Mandrake is that comes with the leaner desktops like XFCE and Blackbox. It aint always that one needs a bloated DE like KDE or GNOME and it helps to fall back on one of these.

Programming wise, Glade had the same problems with compiling on Mandrake 9.1 as Mandrake 9.0, and I had to eliminate gettext support to get the built source code to work. I dont work on QT, so I really cant comment on that, but then the kind of tools Mandrake 9.1 provides are really all one could ask for, to program using free tools. Mandrake provides Screem! as a standard component, and it is a mind blowing HTML editor for most purposes.

Mandrake 9.1 seemed to have a problem with my NIC and I had to play around with the system, to finally make it work. But as I always say, "When it works on Mandrake, it works like hell". Samba, Squid, Apache and proftpd, a few servers I use on a regular basis these days, delivered tremendous performance. Drakconf provides newbie-friendly interfaces to mount SMB and NFS shares and configure firewalls and gets my vote for the top graphical setup utility, along with YAST2. RPMDrake is great as usual and beats the competition hands down.

In my opinion Mandrake 9.1 is a top class distro and will continue to be my fav (till the time I get to see Slack 9). I feel sorry I cant do much to help the guys at Mandrakesoft who are doing such a good job with this distro. I shudder to think of the day when Mandrakesoft closes down and we are left at the mercy of RedHat.