This will reignite interest in mandriva... I o not know why people always go for the less polished distros, like ubuntu, over something supported nad stable like mandriva.

I've been using Mandriva for 6 years and I am thoroughly unimpressed with Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and all the other Linux distros that seem to be garnering so much attention. Ubuntu especially unimpresses me because it's supposed to be some big jump in desktop usability, but doesn't seem to offer anything that Mandriva doesn't offer, and actually tends to be lacking in quite a few areas.

Too late for me. I used Mandrake for years, then the shift to Mandriva occurred, and then the problems started. The repositories got screwed up (I know, they were required to change the name, but they could have done it more smoothly), then packages became even more out of date (it was still running a 2.6.12 kernel for MDV2006 last time I checked), and finally I just got too fed up and switched to Fedora Core 5, and have been running Fedora ever since. I will probably upgrade an old file server that is still running Mandrake, just so I can get updates (right now, updates are not even possible).

I o not know why people always go for the less polished distros, like ubuntu, over something supported nad stable like mandriva.

I can tell you why I switched to Kubuntu after six years with Mandr[ake,iva]:

1. 64-bits was relegated to very-low-priority (an inordinate number of supposedly-supported 64-bit packages had dependency failures)
2. A large percentage of bug reports would lie untouched not just for months, but for years. I have within the past couple of months received acknowledgements for bugs that I filed nearly two years ago -- and those acknowledgements basically came down to "this bug report is filed against a version that is no longer supported".
3. When a bug report was acknowledged in a timely manner, it was almost always to the effect of "this bug does not exist in 32-bit version; unable to test 64-bit" (or the fact that it was filed against 64-bit was simply ignored)
4. Official update mirrors would disappear for weeks at a time
5. Security updates would be made available weeks after exploits became known.

My experience with Kubuntu has not been painless, but I have found none of the above to be true for Kubuntu. It was with considerable reluctance that I switched, but in any case those were my reasons.

YMMV, of course (and probably does).

I have to agree that Mandriva's team responds to bug reports too slowly, and do not do enough to fix them. I think that is simply due to lack of man power. But they are making better and better distros since they came into being (I mean Mandriva, not Mandrake). Perhaps if they pick up popularity, they will also make more money and then they can hire enough man power to do it right. Right now though they are far away from being there. I hope to see them improve to get to see better times though.

Just curious as to what differences/lacks you've encountered?

No linux distro has ever entirely caught me, but to date my favourite was Mandrake v7.2.

I'd almost like to give it another shot, but I'm happily running Kubuntu on my laptop and really can't justify pulling a solid system to scratch that itch. To date, personally, Kubuntu and the rest of the Ubuntu family have the most cohesive feel to a Linux based distro I've known. Mandriva's user tools used to shine, but unless they've done something remarkable I just don't see much advantage. And the breakage in the last version (specifically the x86_64) left a very sour taste in my mouth. Maybe on day at work I'll pluck about with a spare server, but if Ubuntu can continue on it's current path I'm probably hooked. It feels like a system.

When the name change occurred my account with their Mickey Mouse... make that Mandrake... rather Mandriva Club broke. My emails went unanswered, in spite of the fact I'd shelled out money to them. Switched to Fedora and haven't looked back (though am looking forward to trying Kubuntu). Frankly, I'm surprised they still exist.

I too used Mandrake / Mandriva for years (it was my first full-time distro), but wandered away a few years back. I lost track of the company once Gaël Duval left. Partly, I was disappointed by the website, which I never quite understood (perhaps I should have studied harder in French :-). Partly, I kept falling into dependency hell - when I tried Ubuntu, installing new packages Just Worked, and I couldn't bring myself to return to my first love.

But I remember Mandriva fondly, and wish them all the best with 2008.

1. Searching for the new location for the repository. They seemed to constantly change the paths arbitrarily every few weeks or so, apparently because they 'decided' that the old path wasn't a good naming convention or something.
This is now done interactively from the package manager, you just click "add" and it gets a list of mirrors over the internet, you choose one, and your medias are automagically configured:
main + contrib + non-free which countain most of the stuff and their respective updates, backports, testing directories. (backports and testing being ignored by default without you having to configure anything).
So all this is transparent to the user now.

2. Downloading the updated package info.
there has been for years a synthesis version of this which is just a few Ko heavy.
With the procedure above, the synthesis version is chosen by defaut, you can choose by media to use or not the synthesis version. So info updates takes only a few seconds unless you really want the extra infos that are in the complete info file.

All this is of course possible from the command line too.

I agree completely. I tried Kubuntu and went back to Mandriva.

There is one thing that is better in Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Package installation. The repo is a bit larger, Synaptic has a lot more in the way of search and filtering than RPMDrake, and apt has suggested and recommended package relationships as well a required.

Other than that, Mandriva is better in every way. Configuration, in particular, is way ahead of Ubuntu, and more ahead of Kubuntu.

An hour??? Obviously your setup was wrong. The Mandriva update mechanism is the same idea as the Ubuntu one - updates are done from world-wide mirrors, so if it is configured right then it cannot be any better or worse than Ubuntu.

I ended up running cooker to try to keep up to date and try packages that were not available as stable.

This problem has been solved since the release of 2007.0, which introduced new media on the mirrors, and at the same time changes to the build system allowing maintainers to easily submit testing and backport packages from cooker.

At present, selection of packages to backport is mainly done by the maintainer, but requests are often taken on IRC and mailing lists.

IMHO, there is almost no advantage Ubuntu has over Mandriva (besides hype).

I'm not sure about the Mandriva Repositories, which are quite large, but once you use Easy URPMI [zarb.org] to add the contrib and PLF sources, then I don't think there's a piece of software that I haven't been able to find.