This is probably silly to do on the eve of the release of Mandrake 10.1, but there are some things that really get my goat when using version 10.0. I’ve been using it as my main desktop since it was released, so I’ve got a pretty good impression of what it is like. Read on if you’re interested in using it but haven’t tried it yet, or if you want to hear about some of the negative points of using Mandrake. I’m sure that most distributions have thier good and bad points – I won’t discuss the good (since I wouldn’t be using it if I didn’t like the good parts), just the bad!

The very first thing that got me after installing Mandrake 10.0 was that KDevelop didn’t work right. In 9.2 everything seemed hunky-dory, but 10.0 brought on an almost immediate crash everytime I opened projects from my 9.2 install.

I never really found out what was up with this, even after searching kdevelop’s website. Eventually I found that deleting a certain file in the project directory kept Kdevelop from crashing, but there was never any FAQ or anything about that from Mandrake.

The next thing was that debugging in KDevelop no longer worked, either. Yay! KDBG also didn’t work at all right-out-of-the-box; I had to download the source and recompile a newer version.

Debugging within KDevelop still doesn’t work. KDE crashes, handled by the “KDE Crash Handler”, no longer give up any useful information, either.

Want to recompile KDE with some nifty kde enhancements/extensions? Forget about it, you probably won’t even figure out which packages to install, much less how to apply patches. It seems that noone out there gives any clear instructions how to do this when using Mandrake.

Upgrading? I wouldn’t recommend upgrading, if you’re thinking about that, since Mandrake seems to follow the path of windows with screwing things up a bit when you do this – after upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2, I had 10 new CD-ROM links on my desktop that would never seem to go away, even if I deleted them. Strange.

In any case, another thing that is unusual and annoying: the sound server crashes when using KDE. Sometimes, out of the blue, the soundserver just goes kaputt. No idea why. It seems to happen when you’re doing lots of things that make noise (like playing a MP3 and system sounds occur from opening windows/etc). Not only that, but I had to screw around with the KDE config for a while before I could even get system sounds to work at all.

Installing packages can be a pain. For example, I spent a couple of hours trying to install the latest and greatest of Inkscape and Scribus, both excellent programs. Inkscape sent me through a dependancy hell that I don’t want to repeat, while Mandrake insisted that I had to switch to more current library versions that I didn’t have. Even recompiling from source can also be a pain in the ass, and you can spend hours searching for RPM’s or sources just to get something else working so something else is satisfied so that something else is satisfied so that your main objective will compile.

That’s mostly normal to the Linux world, but it seems like that Mandrake releases are pretty much outdated as soon as they are released. At least that is the way it feels, as a normal user.

My Zaurus isn’t recognized like a normal USB storage device. Instead, it comes up as a series of SCSI devices, and I need to pick the right one to mount it. That sucks, and that’s why I only use wireless to connect to my desktop from my zaurus.

If you want to play quicktime movies, something that I know I did before on previous versions, you might have a problem. I installed MPlayer and related libraries, Totem, Xine – nada. Still can’t play most quicktime movies.

Mounting shared Windows partitions using Smb4k is flakey. It works, but sometimes crashes when you’re using it in Konqueror. Java doesn’t seem to work right in Konqueror, but it never really has, so that’s no big loss (for the best stability, use Opera. Next, Firefox – but it has its problems, too).

Kopete, the messenger that comes with Mandrake, stopped working with the Yahoo protocols a couple of months ago. There was no RPM from Mandrake, so you had to fix it manually. What kind of beginner wants to do that?

And a general gripe about KDE – why isn’t there an easy way to execute programs when KDE begins? I know, there is the “save session” option that will start some previous applications, but there are some things that I must add to a script to get them going. Why not an “Autostart” folder? (There is an autostart directory hidden in your home directory under .kde )

All in all, I really like Mandrake, but I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time just trying to get things to work. I’m not that dumb, and it’s not that hard, it just takes a lot of time. One day it won’t be like that Anyone else have any other gripes about Mandrake?