Not really using this much, so here's what I think of Mandriva 2010.0

Well, first of all the first positive note is that Mandriva 2009.1 had programs for a live update. When 2010.0 came out, a message flashed asking me if I wanted to upgrade. Very nice, just a few clicks and an hour or two later it had downloaded and installed everything.

2010.0 has some fairly big changes done over 2009.1, of course the new Mozilla 3.5 is now the standard browser, and it's very fast. In fact, it seems that speed is the key word for 2010, the bootup sequence is quicker, though not by as much as the shutdown, which is less than 10 seconds. No, that's not sleep or hibernation, and it really is that quick for me. The KDE4 apps start up incredibly quickly as well, but I'm not sure that's entirely new considering they've always been pretty fast. Amarok get the gold star for improvement, starting up in less than a second.

I've wanted to say this for a while, and now I can: Finally a mature KDE4 release! The only thing I still find myself missing still is the "tiled maxpect" of KDE3.5, how much code would it take to bring back? There are some really cool plasma modules for the desktop, so you can have things like a spinning globe, animated in real time, as your wallpaper or the Mandelbrot set rendered with whatever colors you wish. The amount of new eye candy is borderline ridiculous, to be honest, but the polish is apparent in every part of the distro.

There were some problems with the system tray in 2009.1, but they've been completely taken care of, it seems. The system tray, has taken a lot of inspiration from the Windows tray, and I'd consider that to its benefit. There's still no obscene amount of tray icons in Linux in general, but it's nice to be able to set up which tray icons you'd like hidden and which ones to always show.
Actually every problem thus far I had with 2009.1 have been fixed, the notification piling is gone, all the hickups I'd noticed with Plasma such as handles getting stuck seem to have been fixed in one way or another, and so on.

The only thing I can think of that I haven't tested yet is PulseAudio, and I really don't want to try to start it up while already playing audio. In any case the distro runs fine without it, so it's not a big problem if it's still not ready for prime time.

I'm by no means a professional reviewer, and I don't really have time to go point by point on every new feature. I haven't looked into the network sharing or user administration at all, for example, so I really can't say anything about it. Suffice it to say that Mandriva 2010.0 is quite an improvement on 2009.1 for a casual user like me, and well worth the time it takes to update.

Update: PulseAudio is VERY cool, it sometimes spazzes out when running Wine for some reason (about 1 in 10, I'd guess), though pausing audio while starting up Wine seems to fix any issues. It's certainly showing its potential here, per-program volume and balance settings are quite handy and work perfectly. The only thing I haven't been able to test is mic input, so that's a potential worry, but considering how well everything else works it probably does, too.