This is great news indeed. I have been a subscriber of this magazine, which has a broad spectrum of content from clues for the noob geek to the advanced kernel hacks, etc. The authors have an amateur enthusiasm and a truly funny style. Love to have them back!

This is great news indeed. I have been a subscriber of this magazine, which has a broad spectrum of content from clues for the noob geek to the advanced kernel hacks, etc. The authors have an amateur enthusiasm and a truly funny style. Love to have them back!

As a former Mandriva user, I can attest that it just used to work. The distribution overall was very well organized, and would work out of the box without much tweaking, which is not the case for some other distributions. It had an intuitive interface (MCC) for tweaking things, as well. Plus the power of CLI as is the case for all Iinux distributions. In summary, it used to be a very user-friendly and well-polished distribution in its better days.

It is open source, it is free (both as in speech and beer), it has a fairly high quality both under the hood and on skin. I have been using it for more than 2 years now and it has not failed me like some android phones did. Very easy to use, quite stable. Heartfelt kudos to the developers, maintainers and the whole community.
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"Look like you are or be like you look"
Rumi

May I suggest setting up a NAS? Wherever you like (garage, or wherever). You can set it up with RAID, and use it as a backup server too if you would like. This way, you don't need to get rid of your current system but just add up. There are a few of them now with plenty of HDD space and flexible RAID configuration, so that you don't have to get all HDDs with same capacity, specifications, etc. Therefore, you can even upgrade HDDs as you go. I personally have Synology DS1511 in my wishlist, although it is not a cheap toy. I don't feel I know enough to recommend any other file system. ext3,ext4, NTFS are what I use currently and I am naive if I am missing anything. Similarly, I don't know much about the differences between various linux flavors and BSD, therefore I think whichever you are most comfortable with should serve you well. x264/mkv is the format I use too, even for my blueray backups. It serves me well, and I personally don't plan to change it any time soon.

I don't have a strong feeling about any window manager these days, although KDE4 is more stable than ever, and TDE is very fast, stable and nostalgic. I prefer gkrellm somewhere on my desktop as a habit more than anything else. It helps me to keep an eye on the network and CPU usage (boinc runs continuously in the background, and sometimes a virtual machine too), as well as temperature readings.