[CS-FSLUG] Back to Mandrake

[N. Thompson]

I've been bouncing back and fourth between Mandrake and SUSE lately, and I 
can't seem to pick one or the other (they are both great).

Since SUSE 9.1 professional is so expensive I'm just as easily considering 
Mandrake Linux 10.0, perhaps someone in the list could offer some sort of 
comments that would help me choose between the two?

So far this is the best Mandrake release I have tried yet, the extra community 
edition phase has eliminated more bugs then in any of their previous releases 
as far as I can tell. I'm very happy with Mandrake 10.0.

There is however the matter of media support in both Mandrake and SUSE, as I 
understand it neither has much support for media formats out of the box, that 
requires MPlayer and some illegal (in U.S & maybe Canada) libraries.

I'm wondering, which distribution of these two would be the best desktop 
distribution _with development tools_ and which one offers more bang for the 
buck?


BTW. When bringing up points for either distribution please keep the following 
in mind:
	- I am not a member of the Mandrake club and would rather buy a boxed set.
	- I have an NVidia GeForce FX card and would like drivers for it.
	- I want to have Java support, preferrably even the J2SDK (software 
developers kit)
	- I want good multimedia support if possible, that include Macromedia flash 
player.
	- Up to date software and discounts on updates would be nice, availability in 
local stores would be even nicer however neither distribution has up to date 
versions in any of the local stores.
	- I am still better acquainted with Mandrake, however I have figured out more 
then enough of SUSE to run that almost as well.
	- Third party package sources such as  the Penguin liberation front should be 
excluded from the comparison as last time I had them added  as a source of 
RPM's it messed up all my packages and left me with a really unstable system. 
I found out that some cooker RPM's make it in there so unless I'm only 
getting specific packages from them I will not use them at all.