I've been running Mandrake 8.0 (Ximian Gnome desktop) and it's been giving me the necessary updates so far, but with a large majority moving on up to 8.2 I'm wondering it I should go for it. I don't want to bother if it's really not worth my while.

If I'm already content with 8.0 is there any major reason (better support, more drivers, better supported software?) to do so. And I was wondering if so, how seemless the upgrade process is from Mandy 8.0 to 8.2

Plus I'm guessing I'd have to re-d/l all of the necessary .rpms for Ximian (Mandrake 8.2) as well.

I already burned a copy of the CDs so I have an itchy trigger finger to release

Thanks

Nope.
I have Mandrake 8.0 on an old box and you can just upgrade the wm

Also most soft that works with 8.2 will work with 8.0

True.
8.2 also seems a tad slower as well, but that may be me.
I only use 8.2 over 8.0 because... Well, actually I dont know?

Sod it, I am going to chuck 8.0 onto a drive tonight and find out!

Oh yeah, I only have a 2 CD set of 8.0 and I got a 3 CD set on 8.2, and the 8.0 install often asked for the 3rd CD... Which I dont have!

Other than that?.... I think the kernal is a bit more up to date, and xf86 has better support for my GFX card ( Matrox )

I had 8.1 and liked it a lot, then I went to 8.2 and had problems. Friend of mine had similar problems with 8.2. Seems like it was related to AMD Athlon cpu's.

I went with rh7.3 with updated kernel for AMD and it rocks.
My friend went back to 8.1.......................both of our opinions were that Mandy released 8.2 too soon, should have worked on it longer and released an8.5 or something.

If you're unsure about whether you need to fully upgrade, as opposed to upgrading bits here and there as you see fit, then you probably don't need to. I would, however, suggest that you give it a try. If you have the harddisk space (and the inclination), you could do a multi-boot of your current setup and have Mandy 8.2 aswell! There's plenty of threads around on how to setup a multi-boot system.

Or if your going to dual boot, try a different distro.

Hey dave, whats a good distro for dual booting w/ win2k?

Any of them are no problem, the boot loader (lilo or grub) will handle the booting.

If you like Mandrake, you could fit right into RedHat.

But you should try out a few to see what you like. I recommend Slack for someone wanting to compile there own kernel, and just learning linux in general.

I have been a Mandy kinda guy since 7.2 I tried RH, and Suse, but didn't quite like them as much as Mandy. I had 8.0, then 8.1 and then 8.2, and now cooker. And throughout all of them, I liked 7.2 the best, but it didn't have as much support as I have now with the latest and greatest. But out of 8.0 and 8.2, I really liked 8.2 better. It (to me) seemed to be moving more towards being it's own distro rather than a RH clone, and also towards being more "standard" on linux type standards. I went back and installed 8.0 again a while back, and then just did a "packages upgrade" with 8.2, but it still seemed to not work quite as well as when I did the full install, so I would suggest at least to do more than just the "package upgrade" and do the full distro upgrade if you are going to do any at all.

But if you are really looking for "bleeding edge" then the cooker might be more on track of what you want. But just to see what else is out there, if you haven't already, take a look at non RPM based distros. Slack is where I went. It's nice to learn what else is out there so you can at least make an educated decision on which one you have as your favorite.

hmmm thanks guys, I'll definitely look into it but I'll stick with 8.0 for now......

Oh and yeah I have worked plenty with RH 7.2 at work so I probably don't have a pressing need to incorporate it at home just yet (but I may in the future if I add another primary partition(s) or computer, we'll see). But I do agree CroTeam that RedHat would be your best bet in a dual-boot w/ Windoze 2K, Mandrake aside of course

Aside from Slackware (which I haven't played with yet), another nice challenge to really help you get your feet wet (especially w/ initial install) is FreeBSD. I must say that from setting it up on my second machine that it really helped me learn a lot of Unix by sheer force. One to look into if you're quite interested with Slackware alone.