From Slashdot, I was pleased to find this review of Mandrake 9.0. It wasn’t as positive as I thought it might be, though:
[…] Mandrake is using pretty much the default themes and colors of KDE 3.0.3, which looks dated and ugly at best. Even the default Gnome2 looks better than the default KDE. MandrakeSoft should realize that their two main competitors have made strides in making their desktops more delightful and nicer to the eye and the usability (while RH and SuSE are not even trying to compete to the desktop as straightful as MandrakeSoft is), while Mandrake is still the same old, same old. I had to change a lot of things to my desktop to make it look something that can moderately please me. The fact that you can change a lot of KDE’s aspects with some downloads is not the answer. Mandrake should have worked on the looks and the UI. I wonder if they do employ a UI designer, and if they do, if their developers actually listen to him/her.
MandrakeSoft replied to me that their customer research showed that businesses favor their default grey-ish UI, while home users customize everything on their own. Personally, I find hard to believe that businesses would not favor a better UI, while the home users won't have to tweak everything after installation. […]
That’s not to say that Mandrake 9.0 is a bad distiribution, but I really value Eugenia Loli-Queru’s opinion. She did a great review of KDE 3 (from a UI standpoint), and I consider her UI intuition to be on par with Anand’s hardware intuition ;).
She also recently reviewed Red Hat 8.0, which she seemed to like a bit better:
As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven’t seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is “Sans”) are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920x1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. […]
For me, the killer feature of Red Hat 8.0 is its antialiased fonts (thanks to Xft2). As far as I know, Red Hat 8.0 is the only major distribution to come with XFt2 out-of-the-box. And, that makes it quite tempting to me.
On the other hand, Mandrake is very solid overall, and it’s sure to include Xft2 in its next point-release. So, maybe I’ll wait a bit for that. Really, it all depends on how soon I get my new PC built (which is going rather slowly with my current income).
Mandrake and other distros have had antialiasing support for several releases, with XFT (not XFT2 yet, sure, but boohoo.)
I think the reviewer misses the point about Mandrake’s UI. The true value of this distribution is not the default theme it ships with, it’s the tools it provides for installation, configuration, etc. which are leagues above those of RedHat. Sure, RedHat ships with a different default theme that may look “slicker”, but what does that really matter to usability? Changing the theme doesn’t make your Linux box any easier to administer or do work on. Good tools do.
Besides, shouldn’t the look-and-feel of the desktop be something left to the desktop environment makers, namely the Gnome and KDE groups? Why duplicate the effort? That’s counter-productive, especially when RedHat’s modifications have introduced known compatibility bugs that may cause more trouble than whatever they are intended to gain.
I’ve been using Mandrake Linux 9.0 since the day it came out, as my one and only home OS. To tell you the truth, there are several annoying bugs, some of which are Mandrake’s fault (like the spinning CD-ROM bug that slows down any attempt to run Nautilis, KPackage, and other utilities — an problem with how it is using “supermount” I suppose). “Mandrake Update” is also very spotty. Most of the time it doesn’t work because some FTP server is overloaded. I have a laundry list of other complaints and reasons why Linux (at least in this distribution) may be fine for servers, office work, and coding, but still isn’t a viable home OS (by which I mean, an OS for multimedia, internet, and gaming). Email me for more of what I think on this.