Installation:
Mandrake boots from the CD into a graphical installation and gives you three install options: Automatic, Custom or Upgrade. I chose Automatic.
The partitioning and formatting were simple and Mandrake was able to share a boot partition with SuSE 7.0. The boot setup was also reasonably easy using the GRUB boot manager.
Configuration:
Mandrake uses it's own DrakConf and LinuxConf for configuring the system. DrakConf can be used for configuring almost any part of the system and includes a useful device list (like the Windows device manager) of all hardware which has been configured. It had detected my Graphics Card (A Creative Riva TNT2 Ultra), Network Card (A Realtek 8139a) and TV Card (A Hauppauge WinTV) and even configured them! It didn't however, detect my Sound Card (A Creative AWE 64 - Old ISA). Mandrake includes the Red Hat SndConfig for configuring sound cards that was unable to configure my card automatically and complained about the MIDI setup (which was correct).
Mandrake also includes USB support.
Software Content:
I cannot really make a judgement on the Software Content because Mandrake also includes two CDs, which I did not have (An Extension CD and an Applications CD). Mandrake comes with KDE as the main window manager and does include a few others including Enlightenment.
My Thoughts:
I think that if I had had the other two CDs that I would have been more impressed than I was. Although Mandrake was really easy to install and configure I was a bit disappointed about the Sound Configuration not being automatic like everything else. I think that if that one thing was improved then I would probably have been impressed as I would imagine that Mandrake does have a good Software Content (if you've got the other CDs).