You more or less echo my sentiments....
Its easy for me becuase english is my first language BUT I was encouraging closer links with other mandrakeusers boards...

I frequent the french ones but only really hang-out in the international one....

And I'm considdering a turn-back to debian... not sure, though.
Well I just did the opposite, dumped Mandrake in favour of Knoppix....

I'm convinced their package management is better, although urpmi is very good indeed.
Yeah well urpmi is great, if only they wrote it into kpackage too......and in the end apt is superior.
The tools for Mandrake, and its standard-configuration are better than debian, but using Knoppix, debian is put on your system quite well configured, too.
Well thats what happened to me....
I hate the propreitry nature of Mandrake....
The wizards which do things a weird way (like the shorewall config)
The turning point for me was a combination of things
1) PCMCIA is enabled AFTER networking (after all these years it hasn't occured to them to change this)
2) PCMCIA needs a kernel recompile in Mandy for my laptop. Debian and of course knoppix don't
3) They got rid of linuxconf becuase its not compatible with Mandrake wizards.... what next webmin ????
4) The wizards are undocumented, when they work fine, if they fail then backing out iof the mess is 10x the work of doing it by hand in the first place....
5) Non-standard KDE.....
Poor texstar/plf.....
Its a disgrace, KDE say where to put KDE....
So qmail install in /var is a bit quirky, so what its the programmers right.... debian respect the programmers right.....
All the stuff that Mosfet did with liquid would break etc...
6) the UPGRADE option needs taking away and burying .... they never had it working and it comes up as the default..... UPGRADE is important for me, I can't run a server and do a reinstall every time....
Im now building a debian stable for my main server/gateway...mail machine... (hence the qmail ref earlier)

IMHO knoppix is a debian for the lazy (like me)
Noobies can come to debian via knoppix and either stay with knoppix or go pure depending on needs. Mandrake has no real progression...
Its a IMHO a good learning distro... but the recent trend towards commercialism and wizards that only work in mandy have left me wondering why Id stick with it.....

Ive outgrown it for me and my last install of 9.2 was purely to support others....
Its also the first one I haven't bought.....
I don't mind commercial distro's but mandy can't decide where it stands....
Is it bleeding edge or is it lycoris...???
It tries to do everything and fails....
Is it sold in shops, over the internet or preconfigured ???
Then theirs the whole removal of source from the download edition...

They sell Cd's (fine) but don't support them unless you join the mandrakeclub....and as of 9.2 they are making new ISO's with the 400MB of updates (good) but only for club members....(bad)..what about those who bought boxsets...

If it wasn't for the unoffical support of the mandrakeusers.org and the .nl and other national sites they would be practically without support altogether...
hmmm... the only reason I hang at mandrakeusers is the people....

/rant off