New Features for Mandriva 2010

Mandrake was the first Linux distro that I tried and liked a lot. It was a newbie friendly enough distro back then and I still hear (and read) about it these days. Although now it is called Mandriva. LinuxCrunch talks about the 20 new features of Mandriva 2010.

New design for the installer.
Live upgrade
Moblin desktop
Guest accounts
3G features request
Better wireless support
Easier wifi key setup
Better boot time
Better rpmdrake start up speed
Urpmi media auto configuration
Better user information in rpmdrake
Better Drakguard
Better krandr
OpenOffice.org 3.1 and KDE 4 integration
gcc 4.4
Improved diskdrake
GNOME 2.28
KDE 4.3.2
Nepomuk integration
Plymouth boot splash

I really liked it that the installer of Mandrake give us users the freedom to choose the kind of desktop environment we want. Looks like they still give users the option and they even included Moblin for good measure, to keep up with netbook users. I think this will be interesting to test eventually. Moblin offers users an interesting layout for netbook users so that the space is maximized. There’s also the improvement of the tools users use to manage things like disk partitioning. After all, this is one of the things which would be tedious on the command line and could be tricky and scary for users who are not used to the command line interface.

All in all, it does look like Mandriva is going to improve everything to make it usable to users. If you’re a user who’d like the fancy stuff of KDE, it might be an advantage too since there are improvements in krandr (for easy management of the resolution of your monitor, etc.) and then there’s also the OpenOffice.org integration with KDE. GNOME fans also have something to look forward to because GNOME 2.28 is the basis of GNOME 3.0!

Mandriva is looking mighty tempting. But I am really thinking about this well because of the comfort level I currently have with Ubuntu. Ah well, who knows? I might go back to where I started if things keep looking this good. : )