now that I have mandrake installed, and I'm learning more and more about linux, there are a few things i would have done differently given the chance.
first of all, i chose mandrake 7.2 as my OS of choice, and it's a great newbie distro. it has led me to enjoy using linux.
HOWEVER, mandrake does some funny stuff that I just don't like messing with. forget about compiling packages from source. mandrake has lots of funny paths where they put all their components, and if you install things in the wrong place unwittingly, you are SCREWED.
also, alot of the solutions that it seems that mandrake has implemented for some of the more hairy problems seem bolted on. take for instance font handling. now i know that font handling in X is a joke anyway, but the way mandrake does it is surreal. it took me DAYS to figure out why my beautiful fonts weren't printing correctly... and by the time i figured out what the hell was going on, i had lost all desire to fix it
in my humble opinion, debian users are better off in the long run. one, they get apt-get. painless system updating. two, in the stable distribution, everything does exactly what you should expect. in drake, one day the mandrake autoupdater just stopped working. I don't know why it did so, but it did. three, they have a large user base. i know drake probably has the largest market share, but you have to remember that debian isn't going to throw you any curve balls like some *other* distros could *cough*REDHAT7.0*cough*.
ah well, i'm done ranting.
let the flaming begin.
-inq