Ubuntu is the hype distribution of the moment. They sure have a zealous community, but it's not enough to get a good distribution. Do their technical and philosophical progress make it so great and better than our precious Mandriva?

Well, it's certainly not the fact that it's based on a sexist distribution, neither their printing support using CUPS, neither their Samba support, neither their devotion to the free-software cause by providing proprietary applications (like drdsl) and firmwares. Linux in a binary world would be so great!

It's also much more broken than Debian and fails miserably sometimes.

Ok, they have a live installer, but we did it some monthes ago in Mandriva One. But using this new tool as the default installer might be kinda perilous and lead to various crashes.

They state to their live system is faster, but from my tests, the difference is not that huge, there is a lot of room for improvment, since it's sometimes awfully slow (20 minutes to boot? nice improvment!).

Their manual (errm) way of doing live persistence is certainly not user-friendly, where Mandriva Move provided a nice configuration UI (it's currently missing in Mandriva One though)

Their automatic upgrade from older releases looks nice, too bad it isn't that fantastic and sometimes removes "useless" apps.

Finally, they certainly did a good look and feel polish job. They also provide great user-friendly software install tools, like the "Add/Remove Applications" tool (gnome-app-install, see french documentation) and the adept installer, using the ddtp (debian description translation project).

But is that worth the whole ongoing buzz?