France and all the Mandriva fans are going to celebrate the 20009 spring in just a couple of days! That is right - in the end of April, the french Linux distro - Mandriva, will come up with its newest updated version - Spring 2009.1

Mandriva demonstrate that Linux is not for servers and perk geeks, only. Mandriva aims to be desktop oriented Linux distribution and it is really one of the best out there. With its famous and notable easy-to-use configuration tools, it makes Lunux to feel like home on almost any PC hardware nowadays.

The free software (”free” as in “feedom”) fanatics may argue about the fact Mandriva is not a pure free software distro, but comes with closed, proprietary software. Well, there are two sutable answers:

• Yes, MandrivaOne comes with full stack of proprietary software packages, but these are mostly drivers, comming from the official hardware manifactures, such as nVidia (for the video cards), which makes Mandriva easy to configure.
• There is a separate official edition, containing only free software - Mandriva Linux Free. It is a sort of special edition, which do not contains any non-free and proprietary drivers and software packages.

In a couple of weeks, I am going to do a full test on the newest Mandriva One and will share with you my experience. What I expect is to be nicely surprised. Stay turned.