Another quick update. I am still caught up with changes and new things. I have a new civilian job after 5 years. Nice to be back in the private sector after such a long time working in government. But, it is more of a challenge, faster-paced and requires a lot more work. So, I have been very busy trying to get things moving there so that hopefully, when I am done, I will be able to relax a bit more. The new version of Mandriva, 2008 is out and I have upgraded both of my home machines to the new version. This particular upgrade process went very smoothly so I have to give credit to the developers, they are producing better and higher quality releases with each new version.
There was a time when I was against the extended release period with Mandriva, preferring ongoing and more frequent releases with fewer changes. But, I have to admit that going to a twice a year release schedule has allowed them to focus on producing a higher quality release with fewer bugs and I, for one, am benefiting from that quality. I am especially fond of the new upgrade process, I have not had to reinstall versus do an upgrade on any machine over the last 4 releases. Prior to that, I had to reinstall almost for every release. And for the ones when I did not have to reinstall, I had to put a LOT of work into massaging the new applications to make them integrate well. Currently, I have had to do very little to get the default release to work.

Arguably, I do fewer things now since I don't run a server on my current machines, nor do I host applications or the like. However, I have a laptop with specialized applications and functions and my desktop also has some specialized functions, so if anything my environment is more complex now than it was before. There are several things that I don't care much for in the new releases, mostly the dkms packages and architecture. I understand that for newbies who don't want to have to figure out how to compile packages from source, dkms is a superior solution. But the integration of dkms into the kernel, as well as the integration into Mandriva's wizards in general, forces me to jump through hoops to disable the function as dkms does NOT play well with self-compiled packages. But, better that I have to do that than to expect a newbie to know how to do the same type of work.

I do wish that Mandriva would make the use of dkms a command decision, allow people to select whether they want the wizards to manage the use of 3rd party drivers and the like, or whether the user wants to handle that themselves. It would make it easier for both expert and newbie users of Mandriva. But, all in all, I am very pleased with the Mandriva distribution and still prefer that distribution over any of the others that I have toyed with, including Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.

Not much else to add here. My commute to work is much longer, and I have been finding that audio books are a great boon to my new long commute. I have finished 3 books so far and some of them are books I had already read. Nice to be able to revisit those while consumed by driving to work anyway. And it does help me ignore the demands that traffic in Atlanta place on me. Mila, my wife, is still talking about trying to buy another house so I may be moving at some point in the future. Not looking forward to all that work though. That type of change is always traumatic, and I have had more than enough trauma over the last few months.