Mandriva is one of the first/early user-friendly distributions there was. Available in both GNOME and KDE versions, it is a pretty solid distribution, with nice artwork, and a good set of default applications. The Control Center makes life easy for the new user, enabling easy handling of most administrative tasks. Mandriva has recently been voted as the best choice of distribution for developers by LinuxJournal. In my opinion, Mandriva is the distribution which does KDE best, and if you are a fan of KDE, you do not want to miss out on this distro.

I have been using Mandriva on past 4 or 5 years as my Main stable Business OS and though I have been trying some other Linux Distros just for trials. But I have to say that Mandriva never let me down and it really deserves to sit in the best Business and personal desktop linux. Top notch features of mandriva among other distros..

1.faster and quick system response
2.really ergonomic fonts
3.legendary mandriva control centre
4.great theme and artwork
5.simplicity but powerful underneath.

This distro surely better than Ubuntu..No questions...

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Mandriva does so much more than simply "ROCK!" It RAWKS!!! Mandriva One is the way to go, though. Mandriva Free is good, but groovy was right in that using the DVD so much is a bit of a hassel. Free is a good system, but Mandriva One is sweeter. Now, if we could only get Mandriva One in lighter flavors, like E17, LXDE, XFCE, or Openbox... For me, Gnome and KDE are good, but may as well be Windows as far as resource utilization.

Mandriva is a good OS, no doubt. It has been around for years and has millions of users. I downloaded the Mandriva 2010 Free DVD ISO file (huge 4.3 GB honker) and downloaded it on my refurb desktop computer (Lenovo IBM ThinkCenter, 40GB HDD, 512MB RAM, Intel Pentium 4 chipset). One of the RAM cards is fried in this refurbished "wonder," so I'm really only running 256MB. During the installation, I opted for the LXDE version due to the very limited resources on this computer. That said, Mandriva 2010 Free LXDE absolutely FLIES on this computer! The applications ran smoothly, I was able to download new applications smoothly... It made this hunk of junk feel like a new computer again! What I did not like about this particular distro is that the DVD has to be readable during any downloads. This desktop only has a CD-ROM, so I had to use the external DVD-RW drive that I use for my netbook (which is my primary computer) whenever I needed something. I didn't like that inconvenience, so I opted to replace Mandriva 2010 Free with another distro, moonOS.