Well I have said that I would put this out and I didn’t know when I would need to. Yesterday was probably a good day to do so but I was sleeping for a lot of the afternoon so today is the day for Mandriva 2009.0 Review.

Mandriva has been great for users who just like to have something that looks peaceful and easy to use. For new users with laptops I would recommend Mandriva One 2009 as it has a better background and supports wireless…. Mandriva Free also supports wireless but I like to have something that will recognize my wireless card and download the driver when I have a ethernet cable in my laptop.

I have used both types of Mandriva a couple of times, though I mainly stuck to Mandriva One. You can get Mandriva Powerpack which I believe includes support… though I am not actually sure as I have never bought it. I am sure of one thing though, people who want to use Linux and aren’t new probably want to use Mandriva One or maybe even Mandriva Free.

Both Mandriva One and Mandriva Free are Free as in Beer (Please do not send me any as I don’t drink.) The only difference is that Mandriva one uses some non-free drivers and other things that you may want.

Mandriva Free is one of those distros that you get all free and open source software… ie no licenses that you may use that aren’t free in the sense of FLOSS.

The best part of Mandriva is that it is fast, though not as fast as Ubuntu, out of the box. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to try something that looks elegant and asks you what you would like to enable as soon as the livecd or livedvd starts up. You could use Mandrivas’ nice desktop effects or maybe even Compiz, which is what I use most often.

The applications are of great selection and it is great to know that people like to use such new software… not that Debian has to do something about catching up anytime soon.

The time and effort put into this great distribution is more then anyone can shake a stick at. It is a quality distro and should continue on its way. Thank you Mandriva for producing a very nice distro.

Ryan Orser.