Impressions so far:

These have been workstation installs, upgraded from 8.0 or one of the
later freq releases.  The workstations were already configured for use,
and the upgrades preserved the existing configurations.

I've run them in KDE so far, but a lot of improvements seem to have been
made in Gnome - Evolution (0.13) works in IMAP mode without complaint,
although it had to be started twice for a while - once it would just
vanish, the second time it would run fine.  It seems to have gotten over
that.

The Galleon web browser (0.12.1)is very nice - at least as quick as
Opera, loads more quickly than any of the others too.  This installation
includes Netscape, Mozilla, Galleon, and Konqueror.

KDE applications are still taking a long time to load.  Click on a file
or folder shortcut, count to twenty or so before anything comes up.

So far the only thing that appears to be broken is that if you try to
open a non-existent folder, say an unmounted CD, Konqueror not only
dies, but takes most of the desktop with it.

In Evolution, there's a barely noticeable lag between hitting a key and
seeing the letter displayed, mostly noticeable when typing fast. (This
may be due in part to active spell checking, which seems to work at
least as well as any MS product.)

Even though Mandrake 8.1 has expanded to three CD's, I think the
hour-plus upgrades would have gone much faster if they had been clean
installs.  The Mandrake implementations of their RedHat Package
Management are unreasonably CPU intensive, and there was a lot of time
when the CD was idle and no IDE activity appeared.  From previous
observations, I'm putting this down to checking new RPMs against
installed files.

There is a troubling trend toward "we must be just like Microsoft"
thinking in the installs though.  Both linuxconf and webmin are forced
on you, like it or not, and Apache is installed by default even thoug
this is a WORKSTATION!  Hello?  Not a web server, a WORKSTATION!  MS's
"web server on every desktop" lunacy magnified and preserved.

Another example of this is an "Internet Configuration Wizard" that
appears on the desktops by default, even though these are already
configured setups.

Mandrake also offers a "First Time Wizard" that runs you through mail
and browser configuration a la Microsoft.  I really haven't had a chance
to evaluate it, but I still feel that the user who needs something like
that is not likely to end up with a usable installation on their own.
Linux still requires at least a close connection to someone who knows
what they're doing to get the initial configuration up and running.

I don't like the movement to make it as dumbed-down easy as MS's 98 and
XP offerings - most of what's worst about those products is the stupid
automated configuration utilities that arbitrarily screw everything up
on their own.

Still, with a few deletions and a tweak here and there, this looks to be
the best, most usable desktop/workstation distribution so far, and a
definite candidate for anyone who wants to get off the Microsoft train.

I haven't delved into the "office" applications yet, but with two
non-technical users prepared to do so, one of whom is planning to
develop a web page, I should have some good insights to that aspect of
Mandrake 8.1 shortly.