Genious. Sheer, plain genious. We're an early seeder, so I've had access to the final Distros for the last two days and we've been playing around with it. Let me tell you a few things that are worth noting:
* The install was done on two PCs, one a Core 2 Duo on a 965P board (the Gigabyte). It recognized and correctly configured all devices, audio, video (a 7950GT) as well as set performance on SATA drives. It recognized a USB Wireless NIC and was able to do WPA to our router (something I've had significant difficulties with in Linux in the past). The second PC, an AMD 4400+ on the Asus A8N32-SLI correctly configured also, found all drivers out of the box and ran with no issues. * Xen support within it is fantastic. * New game based support under Transgamer allowed for fluid use of games like World of Warcraft and Civilization IV, the only two games we tried. It was indistinguishable from Windows XP as to their performance (IMHO), while I'm sure benchmarks may say different, I was impressed. * The new KDE interface is fluid and intuitive - far more so then MS Vista at this point, and the inbuilt features in the full version - like LinDVD (bundled from Intervideo) offered great features like passing AC3/DTS and decoding as well. I'm not saying that Mandriva 2007 is going to be my regular platform, but this is as close to a solid-consumer friendly desktop format of Linux ever. Period. This is a major leap over Mandriva 2006, and I think a lot of people will be seriously impressed with the feature set. The install is painless. The performance is excellent. Support for hardware is, frankly, better then Vista 5600/5728 at this point. On Monday, Mandriva will release the torrents to the Club members and shortly after that to the public. Let me say this: if you're a club member or if you are thinking about it, this is definitely a distro worth grabbing. CW (Here's hoping I see this post return to me, for some reason I still seem to be NO-ACK with the list since Sunday)
