I was a Mandriva user for 9 years and I am still thankful for the fact that I got introduced to Linux back then. I had a hectic few years behind me in terms of work strain and I simply could not afford to spend a minute on computer troubles. That caused me to install and use Mandriva 2008 Spring for almost 4 years and all I can say is that it ran absolutely rock solid.
Well, it finally became time to move up to new software as the old browsers and things just could not do all the fancy things so nicely, so I started shopping again. Ubuntu and Kubuntu was always high on my list of ones to try, but I must admit that I simply cannot make peace with sudo. If I need to be root, I want to be root. The main issue for me was, that I could simply not make dual screen work on any of the Distros and then I found Mageia! Since dual screen basically worked out of the box I was immediately prepared to spend some effort to make it work.
So far, I am very happy with the Distro. There most serious issue I found is garbage printing, but other than that it is a great first try. Seems that I will stick with it for now.
Then about the topic of this post: I am unable to make DVD's and MP3's play. I installed every single tainted package I could find, but nothing works. What else can I try? I could always easily get it to work with plf libraries. It is not a serious issue as I use my PC mainly for work, but I do need it often enough and don't want to grab the Window$ laptop then.