[CS-FSLUG] Upgrading Mandrake

[N. Thompson]

Anyone know how smoothly it usually is, I've only done it once and it left me 
with some strange bugs however I think others in the list have had smoother 
experiences with it.

Right now I'm considering which distributions are most viable as a good 
desktop system, Mandrake has the advantage of a more open reputation then 
SUSE which has previously kept much of yast under tight guard until recently, 
Mandrake also seems to run faster and over all seems to have a less expensive 
PowerPack edition then SUSE's professional edition. Mandrake has its 
downsides as well however, for one Mandrake has hiked the price on the 
PowerPack+ edition to USD $199 which is very high considering that in the 
past everything in the PowerPack+ edition used to be included in the 
PowerPack edition at a much lower price in the past. Anyway If I were to 
narrow down my choices to two distributions it would come down to a choice 
between Mandrake and SUSE, and I'm sure Mandrake would win. I just need to 
know a few things before being sure of myself.

How smoothly does Mandrake update from one version to the next, I've heard 
there can be some problems upgrading from an edition that doesn't include the 
commercial drivers and software so I know to keep that in mind but what about 
upgrading to a newer version of the same edition as was installed earlier. 
I'm asking since I'd rather find a shortcut around having to install every 
new release from scratch, surely if Windows can do it properly then most 
Linux distributions should also be able to. And what about support for 
suspending the computer to disk (hibernating), I've heard thats going to be 
implemented in Mandrake 10.1 for laptops but that was for laptops, no mention 
as to whether it will also work for desktops. Windows includes such support 
for desktops so it should also be there for Linux and yet when I tried using 
apm or acpi in Mandrake 10.0 I got a message saying the kernel wouldn't 
support it.

Anyway I'm just looking for some input on this, I still won't be ready to 
ditch Windows now until Cadega has good support for Age of Empires, Command & 
Conquer and Rise of Nations but I've been thinking about getting a copy of 
the powerpack edition of Mandrake 10.1 or whichever version is current when I 
finally get around to it, as many of you remember I was also on the verge of 
getting Mandrake Linux when I first tried 9.1.