Adventures with Mandriva 2009.0 Beta 1

Using Mandriva has always been a love-hate relationship for me. Mandriva's distros were attractive, but quite buggy. In old times, whatever you could get for free was already outdated: I still remember the frustration to have GIMP 1.2.5 in Mandriva 10.0.

In recent times, it was mostly about the random bugs introduced with every release, or about the occasional bugs in RPMdrake. And, for me, URPM is indeed smart and much faster than YUM, but YUM's usage is more logical to me (I mean... can you find something uglier than "urpmi.update -a" and "urpmi --auto-select"?).

When I've furiously dropped Mandriva 2008.1 Spring, it was for a couple of reasons:

>> The technical reason: the "One" GNOME and "One" KDE CDs included broken Intel video drivers. To get a working laptop, I would have needed to install from the Free flavor (3 CDs or a DVD), which I refused. Why using something else, when the "One" CDs are here? Alternatively, the unofficial "One" XFCE spin includes updated Intel video drivers, but I switched back from XFCE to GNOME quite some time ago, plus... why the neeed to rely on an unofficial spin? Why can't they release updated "One" CDs? (Hint: because they don't want to.)

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