This afternoon I downloaded Mandrake 9.1, backed up my home dir to CD, formatted my drive and installed Mandrake. I've been full-time on Linux since I discovered how much better suited to certain tasks it is than Windows.
My first full-time primary desktop Linux was Red Hat 8 and I've been using that and Red Hat 9 as my primary environment for about 9 months.
Today I decided it was time to see what it was like in KDE and what the other distros looked like. I looked around and Mandrake seemed the highest-profile KDE distro. After a failed first attempt install - the install just hung about half way through and even though it picked up where it left off, I was left with a mostly broken finished product - my second attempt was much more successful. Mandrake has a user-friendly installation routine and almost all of my hardware was automatically detected and didn't require any user intervention. The one exception was my laptop screen and I had to search through a list, finally settling on "flat panel 1600 x 1200" which I assume to be a generic driver. It worked fine and I was off to the races.
The desktop is pretty nice. I had to jack up the fonts in several places to get legible on this resolution (maybe the OS should offer that if the user selects one of the top resolutions?). A couple of downloads later I had Firebird and XChat2 up and running. I explored some of the bundled applications, poked around in the Konqueror uber-application a bit and I'm almost confortable with things.
I'll report back in a few days after I've got the rest of my environment set up and put some more time into it. So far so good. Linux has certainly come a long way in the last three years.
