I’ve been running Mandriva 2010.0 with KDE4.2 and then 4.4 on my desktop tower since I got back from China in Feb.
Mandriva is my favourite distro. It is rock solid, has a great set of user tools (i.e. quite user friendly) and those tools allow for some great flexibility without needing to delve into text config files, although the distro is structured so that it is fairly straight forward and transparent to delve into it if you want. I’ve tried a few distros over the years, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Arch Linux and I have to say Mandrake and now Mandriva is in my opinion the best balance between flexibility and friendliness. Although I do have a soft spot for Arch, which is currently powering my ancient Dell laptop, you could do worse than choosing Mandriva if you are going for a distro that is stable, with up to date packages, good tools and general professional feeling smoothness. I won’t go into the pros and cons of other distros as this post is about my recent upgrade experience.
To be continued.