After reading a few reviews on both Mandrake 9.1 and Red Hat 9.0 I set out to see for myself which one of these distributions was the easiest to install and use. Mandrake's new installer gave me immediate and logical customization choices (even for a novice such as myself) whereas Red Hat has standardized installs by default, if you want variations it requires selecting the custom install option followed by some ambiguous selections to be made. Mandrake and Red Hat both did a fairly good job of hardware recognition and there were no apparent software application configuration problems or errors after a post install reboot. One noticeable difference I found using the KDE desktop with Mandrake was that it seemed to load a lot faster, applications lanuched quicker and the default sound volume was just about right (the folks at Red Hat must be a lot more patient and have very sensitive hearing). Mandrake’s menu layout was a bit more involved than it probably should be but when it comes to included applications and utilities Mandrake took the show with the most current versions of OpenOffice and Mozilla (a big plus in my book), system utilities that make sense (without requiring some docs to read unlike Red Hat) and native MP3 support was a nice touch as well. Sun's j2re (java runtime environment) 1.4.1, RealPlayer 8 and Macromedia Flash 6 were instantly recognized by Mandrake. Mandrake's anti-alias and font conversion features are nothing short of awesome (making it somewhat of a threat to Windows XP in the near future from my point of view). I give Mandrake an "A" for effort and Red Hat a "B" for better luck next time