Hi Andrew,
I notice in your sig that you are using Mageia. I was a true blue Mandrake/ Mandriva user for over a decade, but I needed a distro which maintained some mapping software I use, and the only one which was up-to-date was Suse, because the developer of the program was the maintainer of its RPMs in the SuSe repositories.
I moved to Mageia from Mandr* as soon as it was announced - didn't install immediately, obviously, but as soon as we had a release. I've been using it since and love it, and seriously like the kind of organisation.
Does Mageia have something similar to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org on their side? How do they handle the non-free stuff like Adobe Reader, and Flash?
Mageia uses urpmi, and handles the various levels of non-free with separate repositories. There are three levels of repository: core (free), non-free and tainted. When you install from a live CD you get free and only free, so if you want packages from non-free or tainted, you would need to add other repos after installation. It means that PLF is really not needed, unless they have packages we don't - and I have installed stuff from the Mandr* repos that weren't in Mageia's, and had it work okay. That mightn't be the case now, because the two distros have diverged some since the fork. More info here: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Release_Notes#The_Mageia_online_reposito... or http://goo.gl/QnW37 in case the big one breaks. Cheers, -- Trish Fraser, VVMZ4 91L2V -35.67910, 142.66607 Sun Dec 30 20:14:18 EST 2012 GNU/Linux 1997-2012 #283226 counter.li.org cassiopeia up 11 hour(s), 5 min. Mageia release 2 (Official) for x86_64 kernel 3.3.8-desktop-2.mga2