To be perfectly honest with you, my original intention was to review Kubuntu 8.04, but with the brand new shiny Linux Mint 5 hitting the streets late last Sunday evening around midnight UK time, Kubuntu will have to take a back seat for now.

As I am a new member of the review team, I'll briefly outline the rules I play by when looking at any modern Linux Distribution, which seasoned enthusiasts will no doubt throw their collective hands in the air and wobble about, but my rules may strike a chord with many newcomers to Linux.

I've been intending to write a review of the EEE-PC for quite some time, considering I was one of the early adopters makes my hesitancy all the more curious. I was impressed at the prospect of Asus' small form, low budget, Linux based notebook.

As you may have noticed, Distro-Review has slipped over this past month and I've not published reviews of the latest releases.  I've simply had too much paid work on to dedicate sufficient time to this website.

Mandriva started life in July 1998 (formally known as Linux-Mandrake) as a KDE distro based on Red Hat. That was nearly 10 years ago and they've just released Mandriva 2008.1 Spring Edition so let's have a look at this release.

As always I'm interested in ease of use, out of the box functionality and intuitiveness. Mandriva 2008.1 uses KDE 3.5.9, Kernel 2.6.24 and Xorg 7.3.

My last two trips into DreamLinux haven't gone so well; most recently I toyed with DL3.0 RC1 and found an okay release plagued by a massively counter-intuitive installer. Let me clarify the importance of the installer yet again:

However excellent a distro may be, an uneccessarily counter-intuitive installer will be too much of a barrier for most users. I don't want to use a release that disregards such an important aspect.