by yankee495 » Feb 5th, '14, 08:50
I probably still have those 19998 disks! I've got Mandrake 6, 7, 8, or 7, 8, 9, something like that...I'd have to check. I forgot what the numbers were but I ran it too. Those were the Windows 98 days and I pretty much ran Mandrake as my main OS, probably 75/25. But when XP came out I used it probably 60% of the time because of other people in the house and it was just easier than rebooting it.
Along about 2005 the kids were loving Mandriva and I think I settled on 2007, didn't like 2008 but didn't work with it much, then 2010. 2011 was the switch to Mageia. I agree with you...looking back Mandrake was great and today the growth of KDE is just awesome and Mageia 4 is fantastic!
My computer back then was a little behind, not bad, but I always wished it was faster, more RAM etc. Today I'm rock'in Mageia & KDE on 16GB RAM, i5-3570k @ 4.3 GHz and SSD's. I guess I don't need to tell you it's a very responsive "fun" computer to use and I can navigate circles around most people, getting to what I want pretty quickly.
I know processors will advance as will Linux, but I don't see any horse power upgrades in the near future. KDE 4.11 is noticeably faster in Magiea 4 and it's stable. I have found some instability in Grouped Apps, attaching konsole to Dolphin for example, but I think that is a KDE thing. If I don't group them it is great.
I wish I'd have wrote a book along the way by simply making detailed notes...One thing that I liked about Mandrake was that it was compiled for 586, not 386 like Redhat, and it improved its speed. I think that is right, 586...see why I need that book.
I've ran Windows 7 enough to know I like everything about it except it's Microsoft and the fact that KDE/Mageia smokes it. I mean, if all the distro were just so-so, I might be running Win7, but I doubt it. I think people will discover Linux in the near future because of the improvements in every area in the last 3~5 years or so. Of course it may never reach the numbers Windows once had because of other devices like tablets etc.
But as desktops become the second computer people will be looking to make them run cheap and Linux is the answer. A lot of people just do Facebook etc so a tablet is fine and an older desktop with Linux would be perfect for them to use when they do need a real computer, but don't want to invest much in one.