I remember when Mandriva (then Mandrake), was THE newbie friendly distro to try merely a few years ago here in the States. Today, most new Linux users have no idea what Mandriva even is thanks to other friendly distros such as Ubuntu.
But it should be noted that we live in a wide world. And Mandriva is actually very popular overseas in places like France, Brazil and in Central America. North America has seemed to largely fall into the Ubuntu or OpenSuSE camps, along with some Fedora among others.
So even as they are ready to release Mandriva 2010, because their US marketing is so… invisible compared to other distros, no here really cares. And that is sad. It’s still a great distro and worth checking out. It is also the base of PCLinuxOS from what I have been told, which should, if nothing else, add to the curiosity.
[awsbullet:mandriva linux]