So far, Mandrake has breezed through most everything I've thrown at it as long as it can use the GUI installer. The worst I've encountered is that I can't seem to get the sound to work reliably on an Intel i810 board.

The one time I ran into an older box with a graphics card that was no longer supported by XFree86 4.0, things turned nightmarish very quickly. Basically, the text installer seemed not to ask for the second CD when it had to, and made repeated everlasting passes to find the "missing" packages. This happened with Mandrake 8.0. Falling back on XFree86 3.3.6 wasn't possible because Mandrake uses a weird hybrid of XFree86 3.3.6 servers on XFree86 4.0 libraries.

So if you're planning this for an older machine, you may want to buy a Suse boxed set. I'm sure they can use the cash after that attack lawyer took a bite out of them last week.

A lot of the frequent upgrades are simply to experiment with the latest and greatest. If that's not your cup of tea, you'll do fine without a network connection.