Mandrake down the line (newb question)

[The Occult]

Hello all. I'm new to the Linux world and have just installed Mandrake 7.2 without too many problems. Before I ask my question I'll give a little background on my decision for Mandrake since "what distro?" seems to be a question newbies like myself are asking.

I chose MDK 7.2 because there was 1.)Support for my vidcard (geforce2) 2.)Got the install cd's and 4 :on-cd" books with documentation (in a pretty box I might add) at a comp show for $15 (whereas RedHat was selling for $35) 3.)A previous purchase of Caldera's Linux wouldn't work at all 4.)There were decent reviews of MDK at linuxnewbie.org.

OK, now my question: I've read several general topics trying to get the feel of the Linux community and I've noticed a trend in comments about MDK 7+. Mainly that it may be initially stable but then becomes unstable. Does this mean:

1.)The more apps/services/work you make it do the more it begins to fail? Are there preventaive mantainence procedures that can be done to head off such failures?

2.)Are there certain things that it doesn't do well like Web or Mail server, Mail Relay Host (etc)?

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, I've been playing with it for a week now and have installed it and re-installed it about 12 times, just trying out different install scenarios. So far, it's only failed to shut down once and I think that was because of my screwing around with the mouse and KB. Otherwise I think it's a great package and sites like this one are great at supporting it.

I'm thinking I'll download the Debian or Slackware version in a month or so since people say they are great to learn from.

[Marcel2008]

I never heard of mandrake becoming unstable, however upgrading a new kernel in mandrake is quite difficult. Mandrake uses features that's won't work with newer kernels. If you have redhat, upgrading a kernel is no problem.

[mindwarp.out]

#1. Yes debian rocks

#2. No matter what some X programs will crash on you someday, somehow, somewhere. Its just a matter of when

#3. Mandrake makes a great server, just as good as any other linux distro

#4. Slack is good for learning, but if you try and run it, remember to set aside several hours a month to search for and upgrade packages manually (vs. apt-get and the 5 seconds it takes. Also, don't rely on slackup or autoslack, both severly messed up my system when I tried them).

So in conclusion... Debian rules.. but Mandrake aint all that bad either, but you won't learn near as much.

Mindwarp

[HarryGoiter]

I used mandrake for about a year when I first started screwing with Linux. It was incredibly easy to install compared to some others I had tried, and it was easy to use. Over-all probably the best newbie distro in my opinion. Not to mention the documentation that comes with it is written in newbie-talk. But as mentioned above, there were problems running things with new kernels, and even with the provided kernel I ran into problems compiling and running programs. Both problems were fixed when I installed slakware. So my advice is to use Mandrake, learn what you can, and then get red hat or slakware or some other more versatile distro.