I installed Mandriva 2008 in two machines, one has very normal specs: centrino, i810 video (1024x768), ipw2200 wireless.. And the other one is an AMD Turion x2, with an Nvidia GeForce Go 6100 (1280x800), and a highly problematic Broadcom 4318 wireless card.

I used the Mandriva One cd for the centrino notebook, it all went smoothly, all my hardware was fairly recognized and configured and in a few minutes I had a running Mandriva 2008. Some things came to my attention though. The processor was functioning at full speed the whole time, although the load was rather low, and even when running on battery power, the frequency didn't change. Cpufreqd was running (I prefer powernow), but the kernel module for the cpu frequency governor  was not loaded by default. Once I loaded the appropriate module (I was surprised to see that the centrino module didn't load) the cpu went back to normal. The other point was when I installed some KDE Applications. I like working on Gnome, but there are some apps for KDE which I simply like better. So I installed K3b and was surprised to see that it didn't run at all. Then I tried installing K9Copy (which isn't officially supported by Mandriva) and, though it ran, it kept complaining from not being able to communicate with the dcop_server. Apart from this, however, the distro was very pleasant, OpenOffice very fast and the looks are also not bad.

On the other machine I installed Mandriva Free using the mini-dual-cd. The installation went on smoothly and everything, including the correct X resolution, was pretty good. The default desktop with this cd is IceWM, which I changed to Gnome once I was able to connect to the Internet. My wireless card was easily configured (once I got the firmware), but with a rather lousy connection --it kept fluctuating between connected and disconnected. In this machine I had exactly the same problem with the processor, so I had to load the governor module manually (powernow_k8). Also, although I installed the Nvidia drivers, I wasn't able to get compiz working.

In general, the distro is not bad. I like it better than Mandriva 2007, and I'm sure that I would have overcome all these problems by looking a little in the forums or something.