Mandriva One 2009

The latest from the old and trusted Mandriva lineup. Downloaded it today and I am writing this from Mandriva itself. Mandriva One is the edition of Mandriva that contains all the necessary drivers and codecs installed to be able to give it an out-of-the-box support. I have the KDE version with me, though the GNOME version is also available.

Here are my observations:

• The artwork is just mindblowing. Hats off to them. The best seen in any distro in this year.
• It features the best implementation of KDE 4 thus far. No other distro even comes closer to it.
• All the well-known apps of Mandriva have been updated to their latest versions - Mandriva Control Center, rpmdrake, etc.
• All the necessary media codecs are installed. So, it was able to play most of my media files. But there was one catch. The default video player is Dragon Player which is not as feature rich and easy to use as Kaffeine. It was able to play my media fine, but gave problems when viewing videos in full screen mode. Also, Totem - the media player for GNOME - is also included in the KDE version! Now, this is weird as this is a duplication of video players. Anyway, there was quite some stuttering while playing videos in Totem.
• For some reason, spell checker is not available in Firefox. All the text I am writing now is being dashed with red color!
• By default, Mandriva logged me as guest. And I was not able to access my partitions by default due to this. Mounting/accessing the partitions through the file manager (Dolphin) gave errors. I had to manually mount the partitions to get going.
• The default font system could have been better.
• The default mouse theme is still "wonderland" (found in Fedora Core 4, 5), which for some reason I don't like.

All in all, this is a nice release, but in terms of functionality, I think it is a little behind its other competitors such as openSuSE and Ubuntu.

Speak of the devil! I just posted a short post of my impressions with Mandriva 2009 in the 'Other OSes' section just a few minutes ago. Glad to see you gave it a try, Anurag!
I haven't noticed some of the problems you mentioned, but then again I don't do heavy video usage, use Firefox spell-checking, or some other things. And I do agree the mouse cursor could've been better. But I must say, the artwork is fantastic!

Yup, the artwork is fantastic; benchmark for all the other distros.