Convince me to stay with Mandriva!

[techieMoe]

Gonna go SuSE, but not for a week or two. Thanks for the help guys. As for the nVidia installer, I'm all too familiar, as I said using Mandrake since latter days of v8. Really doesn't work in Ubuntu?

It didn't for me, but that was mostly because I couldn't figure out how to boot into runlevel 3 (Ubuntu doesn't behave the same as 90% of the distros I've tried in that respect). I imagine were someone to tell you how to do that, you would be fine.

[Flatline]

For the nvidia driver in Ubuntu:

 sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

  sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

I don't remember whether you have to uncomment the "universe" repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list beforehand and run an apt-get update for it to work, but that's how you install the driver.

[techieMoe]

I don't remember whether you have to uncomment the "universe" repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list beforehand and run an apt-get update for it to work, but that's how you install the driver.

Yes, apt is all fine and dandy, but IIRC the nvidia driver that is in the apt repositories is not the same as the commercial driver you can download from Nvidia, due to the aversion of Debian maintainers to include anything closed-source or proprietary in their package list. I always prefer to install my own 3D driver, personally. Thus is why I had trouble with Ubuntu (though had no trouble with Mepis or any other Debian-based distro).

[Flatline]

I know how you feel. I tried the same thing; there doesn't really seem to be an easy way to drop to the command line without X running, since all the runlevels load a GUI.

[bigtomrodney]

Well thanks to everyone who voted green lizard type-thing. I went SuSE last night and I'm very impressed. All detection was smooth but it was fussy about my monitor (1920x1200 FP) which is fair enough I guess, except it listed the monitor... It now thinks I have a 1904x1200 monitor

Well I uncrippled the multimedia which was nice, though I can't really search through DivX without crashing Kaffeine. Teh tutorials were only so much help. But a good distro, and seems far more stable and polished than Mandriva. And this from a lifelong Mandrake supporter!! Thanks again guys, now I can have something new to learn.