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As you probably know, Mandriva is no longer the old Mandrake but is now a combination of Mandrake, Conectiva and Lycoris.

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according to reports, Mandriva is hemoraging money, showed its founder to the door, and unless Mandriva team gets it act together, it most like will suffer an untimely demise.

I haven't heard about them hemoriging! Last I knew they were doing much better. They were out of bankruptcy and that was when they bought up Conectiva, then they signed a deal with some south American country, where they come preloaded on thier pc's. Last I heard, that accounted for 25% of thier business.

Interesting to note. I actually switched from Mandrake to SuSE because of my perception of them as going down in quality. I had run Mandrake 6 on my laptop and 8 on a test machine. When 10.0 came out I tried to use it but it wouldn't detect my hardware. Popping SuSE 9.1 in did the trick. I've been a SuSE/SUSE fan ever since.

Besides, YOU is so much easier than urpmi. (Unless they now have some similar GUI tool which I don't know of.)

I switched from Mandrake to Suse, after a few things built up to bother me. I went from RH5.2 to Mandrake 6 through 8.0, then I got one of those infamous magazines with the bad discs. I tried two other people's I knew and no luck either. I had bought the box sets previously, but the one time I registered it, and tried to use the installation support, in the alloted time, I received no replies or help. That was when I started watching the newsgroups a lot more. The next time I went to buy a Mandrake, it wasn't in stores any longer (since been rectified, with one store). Suse started appearing in stores, locally, and I knew it had a big following, so I made the switch. Been much happier since. And I also agree about YOU. Now I feel more comfortable as I have one well functioning system, so I plan on taking a couple of older ones, and trying things like Gentoo on them, so I learn more about how things work. As I am not sure what I know, and what distro's like Suse, help make easy for me.