[Gllug] Ubuntu and me - suggestions requested (polite ones please)

[Cillian de Roiste]

I hope it's not off-topic but it does concern me that Ubuntu is lauded
as one of the best Linux distros for newcomers as it has not been my
experience either. I started out with Mandrake  7 as a clueless
Windows user and had a very friendly point-and-click desktop Linux
experience back in 2000.

Since then I've run Gentoo for years and Ubuntu since Dapper (I can't
comment on any other distro). I've also had various issues with Ubuntu
over the years and found them hard and sometimes impossible to fix or
workaround. Recently, I decided to try something else and installed
Mandriva 2009. I have found it very nice, stable and hassle free. No
problems with sound, video or networking at all. A very nice feature
is the Mandriva Control Centre which lets you configure pretty much
everything by clicking on buttons. It's very well laid out and has
lots of handy features like Parental Control and Backup utilities.  My
experience with Ubuntu is that when you do run into trouble you end up
trawling through forum posts for hours and need to do a lot from the
command line. This rules it out for me as a distro I can recommend to
newbies. I have set up Mandriva for two Windows users recently and the
only question I've had so far is "how do I install iTunes on it". I
count this as an enormous success.

I did have one issue with it, getting hibernation working. I had it
working on Ubuntu Gutsy, then it broke when I upgraded to Hardy and I
spent about 3 days failing to get it working again. The trick for
getting it working on Mandriva was to install Suse (which seems to
have the best support for Hibernation), and copying over the
configuration (it was two lines in /etc/suspend.conf iirc).

>From a personal (religious?) perspective I'd also like to mention
another reason for trying Mandriva as an alternative to Ubuntu. They
use open source software for their forums, issue tracking and wikis
etc. and they have very clearly contributed a lot of code to the
community too.  While I am grateful for the vast amount of new members
that Ubuntu has brought to the Linux community (and I really love the
theme), I found that their choices of software that they used didn't
sit well with me.

Cheers,
Cillian
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