Well, I do not expect too much support for a free product. 
Mandriva has great forums (certainly other distros too). The positive aspects from my Mandriva experiences were:
- everything just worked with my two-year old inspiron notebook (no drivers to search); there were even NO niggles like unability to to turn the sound up louder or the need to adjust the screen brightness at every startup (which I experienced with the other distros on my hardware).
- the guys on the Mandriva forums are capable and willing to communicate in a not-so-geeky way.
Obviously I am not a power user;so I do not know what I could be missing.
sorry : poor wording on my part -- also it's probably less true today (than 3-4 years ago). What I wanted to convey (maybe wrongly) is that free support for Mandriva free/one is (IMO) not as good as the support for Ubuntu and that one might have to pay for the special packs for extra support and software. But what's your opinion on the matter ?
thanks for taking the time to answer, Lutz_. Mandriva is definitely a good distro. And, yes, they are very dedicated about making linux accessible and easy to learn .
I don't remember exactly why I didn't use Mandriva One more (maybe because of the package manager --> I preferred Ubuntu/Debian's at the time... But it might very well be different now) because it was
very polished (albeit a little buggy).
** Back in 2001, it was the first the first distro I used. Kept it about a year... (was called Mandrake at the time).
