Mandriva 2006 Hits The 'Net, Can it hit me?

Quoted from this news article: "Out of three distributions comes one. Mandriva 2006, the convergence of the former Mandrake, Connectiva and Lycoris Linux distributions was released today. Mandrake acquired Brazilian Linux vendor Conectiva in February for $2.3 million. In April, the combined entity changed its name to Mandriva. In June Mandriva acquired desktop Linux vendor Lycoris. And now it's all together in Mandriva 2006, which is being offered to its "club" members, who pay fees ranging from $66 to $1,320 a year for membership."

In my view, the club membership thing creates boundaries due to having different types of editions and support as well. Unlike Fedora, as far as I know, Mandriva assures the customer support or maintenance as well as the upgrades _only_ on club membership subscriptions. It doesn't have demo versions like in the old SuSe and the Open Source Leader, Red Hat, which has RH Enterprise Linux and Fedora - the latter having clear definitions that it offers _full support_ on their 2 release versions. The Fedora Forum has been indeed very successful and it has also been established as an official forum board for Fedora. Right now, I'm thinking if Mandriva could still be deployed on Internet cafes after knowing that club members can share Mandriva Powerpacks as long as it is not for commercial use.

On the lighter side, choosing over Fedora/Ubuntu/Mandriva on a new machine, I would rather save money, get a Mac Mini someday and try developing applications on it as well. What makes Apple unique is its strategy as far as customer satisfaction is concerned.

Quoted from another news article: "What are your experiences with the Mandriva Club and Mandriva Linux 2006? Are they worth the investment? Is there room for improvement? Are the complaints on the Club's forums just some noise by never-happy eternal "moaners" or are they legitimate gripes about poor customer service? Why is it that SUSE has moved from being a mostly closed and somewhat proprietary distribution to a completely free and open project, while Mandriva has shifted in the opposite direction?" - I hope that Mandriva advocates shall notice this issue as well.