For whatever reason Mandrake Linux was renamed to "Mandriva" Linux, but that's what this is.

This was released in 2011. Even then the Linux desktop had come far away from the clunky mess that it was, and it is now cleaner and more sophisticated than ever. Mandriva 2011 has a clean look, but it was lacking in many key areas.
Mandriva has hundreds of different versions. This is the KDE version since that's what it had come with previously.

The Mandriva splash screen. Of course it doesn't mean much since it still spews command line crap out while booting.

And Linux STILL cannot clear the frame buffer when switching to graphical mode, which outputs some nasty stuff on the screen.

The Mandriva desktop

The first thing one might notice is the overload of icons on the task bar. Dear god, display real-estate is not infinite you know!
This is basically KDE 4 without the Plasma desktop enabled. Icons can be placed directly on the desktop like they should be, but the buttons and things are still there as they would be if Plasma were enabled.

I have no idea why there are little black boxes at the top of the screen. Maybe it has something to do with Virtualbox, maybe it doesn't.

The icon for the K Menu is a pretty bad one, but I will let that slide since main menus are usually on the far left anyways so it should be obvious.

Speaking of obvious, I am using a display resolution of 800*600. I don't know why the menu can't realize that and display all it's content WITHIN that display resolution. Half the damn power button is chopped off, and I can't access it! I have no idea if there is anything on the other side of that cut either. Come on, menus should be able to scale to display size, that has been a thing since Windows 95 (and yes I just compared a 2011 Linux to a 1995 Windows, it will get worse, trust me).

First thing is first: let's reset my clock to the RIGHT time, since we are on DST right now. Here's where the first snag occurs.

The clock is very obviously being displayed in 12-hour time like a normal clock would be. Naturally I would expect to be able to set the time in 12-hour format just like it would be displayed. However the clock can only be set in the incredibly bizarre 24-hour "military" format.
It is (or was) 2011 right now. Setting the time in 12-hour format has been a thing since Windows 1.0 back in 1985. 26 years have passed, and it is still not possible to do that in Linux? Actually less than 26 years since Linux isn't that old but still. Isn't it all just a matter of addition and subtraction anyways?

I don't understand the insistence to use 24-hour time. Neither do I understand why Mandriva insists on having an extra 0 on the front of the hour.
As if that was bad enough, the time zone selector wanted me to choose a city from a gargantuan list instead of the actual time zone. New York is a city/state, not a time zone, and I don't even live in the US so selecting "New York" as my time zone seems completely wrong. Oh, and there is a redundant second control panel with a redundant second setting for time zones.

Yuck, what a mess.

Clicking on the clock brings up a calendar (which won't set the time and date), and it seems to be possible to copy the date and time to the clipboard which is neat, but I fail to see the usefulness in it.