As I sit here, with the last hours of weekend freedom ticking away and another week of teaching beckoning, I look back at the year's experiences with Mandrake/Mandriva.

Perusing the Internet as I am wont to do, the dominance of that "certain other OS" seems more and more like a weakness. To enjoy its dubious benefits safely, I have to have AdAware Personal Edition, Spybot Search and Destroy, Xoftspy and Trend Micro installed; there is even a copy of BitDefender's free edition, and very good it is, too. But all of these things are a pain and they inflate the total cost of the thing. Oh, and PeerGuardian2, as well. This latter has been an eye-opener.

In comparison, my Mandriva installation seems to suffer from no such problems. Of course, if Linuces generally became more preponderant on the desktop, this is a situation which would change. But let's face facts: over 99% of the Internet-related problems faced by PC owners relate directly to the fact that they insist upon using Windoze.

As an example, let's consider the case of a certain business hotel which I have frequented in Sasang, Pusan, here in Korea. They have a router which services (I was told) something like thirty-five Windoze XP Home Edition PCs. At no point within the system (until I arrived) was there even a free firewall program, other than that supplied as part of Windoze. There was no antivirus or anti-anything software installed, and I lost much of my holiday that weekend putting things in place that could sort it all out. Isn't it completely amazing that in an age when personal computing has so many effective freebies for a turkey like Windoze, people are still so ignorant as to not install something like a free third-party firewall? There were literally thousands of bits of spyware and malware, deeply-embedded doodads that I even had to remove manually, and to top it all, there had already been a second installation of XP on the HD because the other had been locked up by a Trojan!

And they'd never even done a defrag, either . . .

The greatest sin, however, was the slavish dependence upon IE as the browser of choice. I even asked the man why they used IE, given that it seems to be shot through with more security holes than a gardener's riddle, and I received the limp, wailing reply: "But everyone uses Internet Explorer!"

Yeah, right. Everyone in Korea who knows absolutely dick about computer security uses Internet Explorer! Perhaps that is why Korea has become such a hub for 'bots and viruses?

I often read about the supposed "disadvantages" of using Linux over Windoze, but the real disadvantage is simply that Windoze is fully proprietary. Its owner doesn't acknowledge competition to be healthy and its own creation is bloated and full of stuff that I never use at all. In contrast, everything that is on my Linux desktop is there specifically because I wanted it there - which probably explains why there is so little to see under Linux! But I am so sick of going to a site like OSNews and seeing yet another pointless puff about the alleged "benefits" of not using OSS, why do I constantly get the impression that someone somewhere thinks he knows better than I do about what I should or should not have on my hard drive?

I suppose we could say that there is something inherently fascistic in the way that many people feel on this issue; which is to say that, having gravitated towards what they consider the "perfect" combination of software for their own needs, they feel the need to evangelise towards others, as if they were all incapable of making up their own minds. Having used Win 3.11, 95, 98SE, 2000 and now XP Home and Pro, as well as Mandrake 7.0, 10.0/10.1/10.2, 2005LE and now Mandriva 2006, I would instead say the following:

Win3.11 could be a pig to use, and I was forever having to reinstall after crashes, but the relative simplicity of the thing was what appealed; what ruined it in the end was the removal of the utility called DOSSHELL. Win 95 looked OK but I found problems although crashes, while not frequent, were never usually devastating. Win 98SE was quite stable and of all the later versions is probably the one I felt that I liked the best. XP Pro has never actually crashed but I did lose it because of the original problems I had installing Mandrake 10.0.

My first encounter with Mandrake was when I saw a cheap copy of MDK7.0 for sale in Cardiff while I was working for the Ministry of Defence there; but I could never get the thing to work properly and eventually actually trashed a small hard drive! But I did like what I saw and when I was finally settled here in Korea and XP was working fine, I used a certain well-known FS program to download a full copy of Mandrake 10.0. I have never looked back, each succeeding distro has improved and there is virtually no difference in performance between XP now and Mandriva; even the silly Internet latency that was still present even in 2005LE has now vanished.

This doesn't mean that I would not be interested in other versions of Linux, but the ease of use of Mandriva and its immediate predecessors makes this distro fine for Linux newbies. By the same token, this also doesn't mean that it's the "perfect" Linux distro for everyone, although one should point out in mitigation that surely everyone should be able to find it useful before passing on to pastures new. I run mine with the Dark Blue colour scheme under KDE (no Gnome silliness here, please!), this is an AMD 2600+ single-core motherboard with 512Mb of DDRAM and some 45 out of 80gigs of HD. My Internet connection is by cable and the local ISP, Hanafos, seems to have upped the speed remarkably of late; updates from the Japanese Riken server have been showing amazing download rates (why is there no "update-source" in Korea????). Printing under 2005LE was OK but for some strange reason, liable to lock up in mid-session using GIMP-Print; but now under Gutenprint, the problem seems to have evaporated. This very evening I have actually been printing out onto OHP transparencies for use at school tomorrow. I can sit here and listen to BBC Radio 3, live, 24 hours a day, I have all the word processing power I could possibly want and using Opera as my main web browser, can do a huge amount of surfing. Finally, I can even use Skype, and did so yet again today to call my parents in England.

There was, however, one field in which I had found, until recently, a glaring omission, and this was the trading platform software used by a number of online currency trading houses. I started with a paper trading account with RefcoFX in New York, but alas, they are temporarily under the provisions of Chapter 11 proceedings due to the dubious activities of their CEO. I shifted over to FXCM, who have a very similar system and trading software, before discovering OANDA, also of New York, whose Java-based software works well on both XP Pro and Mandriva. I am so impressed that I want to commence active trading with them as soon as possible - but this is Christmas and everything is shut down.

It is the ability to use such software in real-time which strikes me as the true indicator of whether Mandriva has come of age. The software is rock-solid, it never crashes and it takes nothing like as much time from boot-up as Windows to be ready for use. Moreover, I can see what is happening in verbose mode, a luxury completely denied under Windoze, where there is just that silly little graphic at the bottom of the screen, a descendant no doubt of the other one used under 95/98SE, and similarly useless. In fact the only thing I have not been able to do under Mandriva is use my webcam, and any advice in this regard would be appreciated.

I shall end this Christmas ramble with a mention of the Interactive Firewall. We are told that blacklisted IPs are only retained temporarily but of course, dive into Webmin (if you have it installed) and your problem is quickly solved. I have a small but slowly-growing collection of Chinese IPs which are forever mounting port scan attacks. Why would the Chinese be remotely interested in a foreigner's private Internet machine? And why, indeed, would computers belonging to public utilities like the Chinese railways waste time on such an exercise? Another East Asian mystery, folks!

In summary, there is one simple reason why I choose Mandriva over Microsoft, it is basically a more enjoyable experience and I have more control, including security, without constant additional costs. In the end I shall be doing much more with it without the silly licencing costs which M$ insists upon thrusting on anyone daring to be a paying customer. Mandriva Linux is truly a passport to life beyond Windoze and for that, it is priceless.