To put it in simple terms... it's really beautiful. The Mandriva team have outdone themselves, in my opinion.
I booted up One on my Toshiba Celeron M laptop to give it a shakedown to see what all has changed from the October release. I wasn't expecting too much from the Metisse interface, as the last time I tried it, it only ran under Gnome and it was much too slow on this particular laptop to be of any use. But once I got One booted up, Metisse (under KDE no less) ran really quickly. I was stunned. What ever work the Mandriva dev. team did in the last couple of months ,working on Metisse, certainly seems to have paid off.
As for Compiz, well, with 2007 my laptop just didn't have enough resources to run it at all. So, I was even more surprised to see Mandriva offering me both Metisse AND Compiz as desktop options. I prepared myself to watch as Mandriva crashed, trying to launch Compiz, but it never happened. Instead, there it was running beautifully this time under 2007.1.
All of this right off of the live CD to boot! Impressive. Most impressive indeed.
They've also improved on the MCC interface and package manager. Much better response time, from what I can tell so far. Hardware detection and set-up seems to be improved, too.
When I first saw screenshots of the Mandriva Spring desktop theme, I have to say I wasn't too impressed with the flowery backdrop. But, after using this new release, I now say it's quite fitting. Mandriva Spring 2007.1 is a really beautiful distribution. As soon as you can, I suggest you get it. It's a work of art... really.
There's some real innovation and forward thinking in this one. It's not just the same ol' stuff from last year, regurgitated and re-packaged to look like something new (I won't point fingers as to which distros I'm thinking of here
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