How do you like Mandrake now that you've played with it a while?

I'm having a lot of fun with it. I checked out some of the apps included with the distro last night. Evolution looks pretty impressive and is obviously designed so that Outlooks users like me have a comfortable alternative on Linux. And I love the fact that Gnome apps run seamlessly on my KDE desktop. After all, some of those apps are pretty good. Although, text cut and paste doesn't always seems to work, ie. copying hyperlinks from Mozilla to Konqueror. I suppose that is because of the difference in the application communication protocols.

KDE dropped CORBA (based on C) and uses DCOP and KParts (based on C++). Within KDE and it's apps cut&paste, tab, alt-tab, etc... all work as expected. In GNOME, or running GNOME apps in KDE I am not sure what they do any more.

On the other side of the coin, I'm having nightmares with the family machine. Over the weekend, I upgraded it to Windows ME because "It Just Works". Right? Wrong, at least not with the hand-me-down hardward on that machine.

I've heard that WinME is the WORST WinXX released. All I've used are Win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11 WFWG 3.11, Win95, Win95B, Win98, Win98SE, NT4 and Win2K Pro.
W2K is better than all the rest... It crashes around once per week on my box, or wipes dataenvironments on VFP forms clean on random occasions.

Actually, I did a new install instead of upgrading the 98SE directory, but still having major problems with Explorer, Kernel32, and Run32 crashes. I can see why they included the System Restore utility, because I'll be using it a lot. If I can't figure it out, I may have to go back to 98SE. But at this point, I'm strongly considering ripping out the MS stuff and installing Mandrake. I'll have to figure out something for the kiddie programs, but the wife will be completely happy with email and internet access through Linux, and oh yeah, MahJong.

The WINE program (Windows Emulator) is getting pretty good. I've used it to run Street Atlas 5.0 and some other apps. The kiddie programs may run fine under WINE, and you may not need WinXX at all. It's worth a try!