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"Anyone know a polished linux distribution that could hold the candle after Ubuntu croaks "

I don't know a comparable one, but I do know at least two that are far, far better.

DrakeFirewall: http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2010/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/tinyfirewall.html

It is available in Mageia as well.

Pop-up notifications, default blocking all, port scan detection, etc.

Been around for years.

There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

10959 http://en.opensuse.org/
11772 http://www.slackware.com/
11189 http://qa.mandriva.com/

What on earth could they have against Slackware, OpenSuSE and Mandriva? There are other entries:

11304 http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
11312 http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

but these could be explained by being torrents. No Debian, CentOS or Mageia in the list. Strange.

I noticed this in the Mandriva blog, where it was pointed out that Mageia and PCLinuxOS both use RPM4 and Mandriva uses RPM5. What's the difference b/w the 2? Earlier in this thread, I was mentioning my problems w/ the RPM system of packaging, and someone was pointing out to me that it has nothing to do w/ file formats. But in addition to everything else, do we now have different versions of package managers? If that's the case, some major culling does need to happen w/ the distros - choice notwithstanding - otherwise even people who want to support Linux will find it hell.

"Mandriva is about to go bankrupt for the second time"

Why do you keep mentioning Mandriva? They do not have the business model that you think that they do. Neither does Canonical, who offers Ubuntu, a community developed operating system for laptops, desktops, and servers; and Ubuntu Advantage that combines systems management tools, technical support, access to online resources, training, and legal assurance. Its services include custom engineering, hardware certification, support, training, and application packaging. The point is that nobody does operate on such a business model, so the question is absurd, and the claim that Mandriva's woes are some kind of indication that said model is no longer viable is equally absurd.

There are any number of distributions which used to charge about $30-100/yr. Most of them were financial failures. The fact is in large numbers Linux end users did mind paying for the OS at least on a regular or consistent basis. But feel free to support http://www.mandriva.com/en/ which is doing what you are asking for 14 years.

If we look at cia.vc and follows the news on who leaved mandriva ( Paulo Zanoni, Xorg maintainer, some months ago, glibc maintainer, some kde team guy ( see http://lwn.net/Articles/441940/ for the details, quite insightful despites being from one of the Mageia founders ), that doesn't look very good. The last one to leave is Eugeni Donodov, the head of the team after mandriva fired Anne Nicolas, and he left 1 month before the release, which doesn't sound very good. So if there is 45 persons in Brasil, why does all commits look like done by volunteers of RosaLabs ( http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-02/msg00000.php ) ?

Maybe you mean "there is 45 persons in Brasil, and they are all working on something else than the distribution" ?

Personnaly, I migrated my servers to Opensuse. The community is as goos as the one of Mandriva, and there is lots of nice nugget, such as zypper, yast, that doesn't make me regret the change. And there is the Evergreen project that is starting to take shape, so no need to wait for Mandriva to have some LTS based on non existant planning.

You mean like pushing various web services like what is planned on http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00484.php For example, rosa sync, a help desk client, etc.

Horse shit. I use Mandriva on a number of critical systems, and I know many others who do the same.

[...]

I've already downloaded the new Mandriva, will put it on my test system later tonight, and will most likely upgrade a dozen or more servers over the week.

Long-time Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia contributor here ... I would warn you that in the past, a lot of server-related packages were maintained by the community (apache and php being about the only ones maintained by one over-worked employee). For a number of reasons, a lot of those contributors have become disenfranchised with Mandriva, and have been porting their work over to Mageia. Thus far, my packages are still in sync between the two, but recent events have been motivating me to rather consolidate my work on Mageia:

• New Mandriva employees making significant (bad) changes to packages which are officially maintained by a community contributor, without consultation.
• Lack of communication with contributor community, with sudden changes to the release plan (one month prior to the planned release, and after the original RC date - which is usually when version freeze kicks in - the release was moved out by 2.5 months). This makes it quite difficult for contributors to plan their contributions (e.g. I put some effort into getting my packages up-to-date for the May freeze date - during times when I had lots of other responsibilities - only to have my effort effectively wasted).
• Lack of commitment to support of development infrastructure - there appears to be little internal support for the development infrastructure, contributors have been doing a lot of the work of maintaining the build cluster, and when they aren't available, it is often off-line for days at a time. In addition, there has been conflict with some of these contributors, so they are now resentful of being the only support for the build cluster.
• Animosity by the RPM5 protagonists
• Lack of effort in supporting the traditional (non-Live-rsync-all-files-to-disk) installer, which is critical in any server-focused environment. Apparently it still works, but if there are bugs they probably won't be addressed.

These issues seem to not be affecting Mageia much, so now that 2011 is out, and I will be forced to decide between Mandriva and Mageia for my own uses, I will probably be upgrading all my Mandriva 2010.1 machines to Magiea, and will probably move all my effort to Mageia and orphan my Mandriva packages (like many other contributors have done). The current focus of Mandriva is not sufficient for my own uses, so I believe my contributions will be of more value to myself in Mageia than Mandriva.

Note to all users considering Mandriva 2011, note that while an upgrade to Mandriva 2011 should be relatively painless, a later crossgrade to Mageia will not be (due to the RPM5 switch in Mandriva 2011), while a cross-grade from Mandriva 2010.1 to Mageia should also be as painless as upgrading to Mandriva 2011. So, while I won't tell you to ditch Mandriva, you should pause at this stage to decide if you are currently on Mandriva 2010.x.

On cursory inspection, Mandriva's new UI uses a GTK+ style, an icon theme based on Elementary, a full-screen launcher similar to Unity's Dash, and a modified version of Dolphin with no menu bar (and no way to enable it). I haven't kept up with why Rosa Labs (page in Russian) has taken over Mandriva UI development, but they have made their mark.

Is the full-screen icon picker, as in gnome-shell, Unity, and now "Simple Welcome" in Mandriva the wave of the future, or just a passing fad? (Personally, I prefer menus.)

Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often.

Mandriva will have an LTS option hopefully by the end of this year. Tour of 2011

Politics in the Mandriva world have played out to start emulating the Ubuntu release cycle sans the two a year release. Instead we will see a normal Mandriva release once a year with regular patches for 1.5 years after release. Starting at the end of this year will be the LTS line. No word on how often a LTS will come out but 2011 LTS will receive patches for 3 years.

Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?

I would dare say that one of the big things that has held Mandriva back is KDE. Mandriva 2011 supports KDE only, no GNOME mess here. KDE's polish over the several iterations since the 4.0 disaster really shows here in Mandriva. Many things are being addressed and there are plans to make normal GTK+ applications more KDE friendly (like how SuSE has made their firefox integrate into KDE nicely.) The biggest thing I think is that Mandriva understands that a lot of people are getting annoyed with the sudden changes in favorite applications and desktops.

The standard kicker is replaced with a Mandriva specific kicker that I think is a good compromise between modern and classical application menus. Amarok is not present in this release, instead is Clementine, which is loosely based on the Amarok of 1.4 days. KMail (and everything it brings) is not present either, instead is Thunderbird from Mozilla. LibreOffice 3.4 is used, which I think is the best version out there thus far and the most useful for day to day operations. (side note:) A few Windows users at our company were switched off of Office 2007 to LibreOffice 3.4.2 and have had really great results in their day to day operations; so much so, we may be moving them off Windows altogether. The users only need TN5250 emulation, Microsoft Exchange support, modern web support, and an Office suite that can connect to DB2 and do Pivot Tables.

Finally, the package manager is what I would call sane for most Linux heads. Yeah it's not dumbed down like the Ubuntu store but I think most people will enjoy what they see here. Overall Mandriva 2011 offers a desktop that I think will rival Ubuntu. With all the compromises that they have made with KDE between new hotness and what we all enjoyed from the Linux desktop pre-Mac OS X copier era, I think this distro will start to fill a ever-growing niche of old school Linux users that enjoyed DE as they were.

So what matters over other desktop distributions is installation, administration, and how it look. There is a tour to show the big headlines, differences with previous versions, and screenshots of the main components, but you can just download it, put it in a pendrive and test it to see if you like it.

The real joke is the fact that the iso is a live dvd, with an install to hard disk option. So it is more like ubuntu this way. Only downside is you can't download the iso and rip the RPMs from it for a network upgrade. Their website says this also :

GNOME, Xfce and other Desktop Environments (DE) and Window Managers (WM) are no longer included in the official Mandriva packages. Contribution packages from the Mandriva community are available for these desktop environments however. Starting from Mandriva Desktop 2011 only KDE4 is officially supported.

Seems kinda dumb to me, the packages are still in Mandriva's repo, but they are in contrib. There's also something about a package manager being worked on too:

Mandriva Package Manager (MPM) is a new package manager for Mandriva. Currently it is under heavy development and is not included in the distribution by default, but you can install it from repository. Please, help us to test MPM. After some period of testing we will include it into Mandriva by default (approximately into Mandriva 2011 LTS).

Other noteable updates are RPM 5, systemd replacing sysvinit, and a newer kernel. (2.6.38.7)

Yup, that's Ubuntu before the suckage added.

  Or Unbuntu with the suck massaged out: http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Too light to contain suck: http://www.archlinux.org/

    Too tiny to hold suck: http://puppylinux.com/

    Got their suck fixed a few releases ago, it's all good now: http://www.fedoraproject.org/

    fixed their suck a while ago too, lookin' good: http://www.freebsd.org/
 
    supports all kinds of desktops that don't suck: http://www.mandriva.com/

    roll your own without the suck: http://www.gentoo.org/

I thought Mandriva was dead, but yesterday I discovered its product for IT management (Pulse). I know this is old news, but it came to my mind reading this.

Mandriva has lost 30 million euros, unable even to win over its' home market despite the government helping push them in education. It's dead, Jim!

There are other distros with equally good installer that are more user friendly in some ways, which still manage to contribute code as well.

Consider Mandriva. Much less well funded than Canonical. Better installer. Better config (I find myself needing to edit config files in Ubuntu for stuff I can use the Control Centre GUI in Mandriva). Mandriva all time contributions to Gnome 's are about half of Canonical's, and they have contributed significantly to KDE, and are still doing quite a lot of other stuff http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/r-d

"Show me ANY Linux where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY"

You can't show me ANY OS that meets that criteria. Windows certainly doesn't, but Mandriva Linux comes closest. It certainly supports all your hardware and when you plug a new device in it helpfully offers to grab the driver and support software and install it. It takes longer to install Windows than Mandriva, and when you are done installing Windows your job has just begun, since you still don't have any useful applications installed. With Mandriva I follow a few simple prompts and when I am done pretty much every application I could want is already installed, and it is easy as point and click to put anything else I might want on it. Seriously, the 1990s called and they want their Anti-Linux troll back.

I found an awesome list created by ubuntu community (didn't find anything comparable from anywhere else)

Not sure why you couldn't find it, but Mandriva has had a database of supported hardware since before I started using Linux (which was Mandrake 9.2, in 2003). Having a list of supported hardware certainly isn't a new idea.
http://www.mandriva.com/hardware/

installed ubuntu and it all worked out of the box. As it always does with Ubuntu.

Glad you've had good luck with it. Last couple times I've tried I couldn't even get the installer to boot. And when my brother tried it took 4 days to get his wifi card to work (a card which works out of the box with Mandriva.) Stuck with Mandriva for many years because of that, though I've recently switched to Arch. And while it takes a couple hours to get the system setup initially on Arch, I couldn't be happier. Haven't had a single problem since installing it.

http://www.opensuse.com/ : redirects to http://en.opensuse.org/Main_Page : 1st sentence "Project: The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere

http://www.redat.com/ iGATE Powers Its Mission-Critical ManageMe Application on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (close call on that one ...)

http://www.mandriva.com/ 1st para : More than 3 million people in the world enjoy our Mandriva Linux platform on their computer.

http://http//fedoraproject.org/: Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software.

http:/// linuxmint.com/ : it's in their url, title, ect: Linux Mint 9 KDE Linux Mint 9 KDE is out!

http://www.debian.org/: Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux.

pclinuxos, puppy linux, etc ...

It's funny how Canonical wants to be seen as the "canonical linux distro", but it's all just marketing fluff and FUGLY color schemes.

"There's a lot of good reasons for putting Linux on a USB stick, but convenience of setup is not and will never be one of them."

Really?

For those of you interested in InstantOn action, there already is Mandriva InstantOn that has some similar design goals (couple of chosen programs, fast boot).

If crapware won't install on your computer, don't install the crapware. I'm sure there's plenty of other choices out there.

This is one area where Linux amazingly has been lacking. Home Domain Controllers. You can create a home domain controller with features Windows has never dreamed. Its just really really, really too hard. There needs to be a Home Domain controller Application added to most Linux Distributions.

Mandriva comes close to this with the ability to setup fully functional Samba Domains stand-alone only. But if you try and configure OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Squid, FreeRadius or anything else, it becomes a time vampire to get it all working right. And its not that the software is buggy. Its that often, the software is configured badly, and not at all.

https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=58653 Take a look at this bug I filed.

That video was made in what, 1985? And Windows sold for $99 according to the ad.

That Windows "ad" was an internally distributed Microsoft video that poked fun at Windows 1.0 for its lack of features and Ballmer for his um, Billy-Mays-ness. I guess the idea is "Look how far we've come!" or something.

IMO, Windows wasn't even usable until Windows for Workgroups, but that's besides the point.

Windows has gone down dramatically. Now, they've been labeled a monopoly in court, but they're pricing isn't that of a monopolist. Actually, they've given the consumer a really nice value.

Now, cue the MS haters who are going to accuse me of being an "apologist" and for being a "revisionist". Whatever. I just think it's an interesting micro economic case study.

The price of their product has nothing to do with whether or not they're a monopolist. In fact, Microsoft has been known to offer their product for nothing or next-to-nothing just for hegemony, which is exactly what you would expect from a monopolist. See the attempt to ruin the Mandriva/Nigeria deal a few years ago for an example...in economic terminology, such actions are called dumping.

Now, one reason the price of Windows has come down is because Windows is just a platform for Microsoft to lock users into their proprietary world, most importantly to sell MS Office (see this chart). Another reason is that the software-as-a-product model is dying, and everyone knows it.

Long-term, Microsoft can't compete with free software and the corporations whose business models are built around it. Expect the price of Windows to come down as the trend continues :)

Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one.

Mandriva 2010 KDE

http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/overview/

In addition, the Mandriva Control Centre is very good, the community is friendly, multiple desktop environments are properly supported (no Kubuntu style underfunded support), the repos are fairly big (but smaller than Debian/Ubuntu) and bug fixes usually happen fast.

its not something you want to be locked into.

http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/overview/

In addition, the Mandriva Control Centre is very good, the community is friendly, multiple desktop environments are properly supported (no Kubuntu style underfunded support), the repos are fairly big (but smaller than Debian/Ubuntu) and bug fixes usually happen fast.

That's the doc-linux-text package in debian which install the HOWTOs in /usr/share/doc/doc-linux-text/HOWTO/.

By the way, debian also links to a desktop user/administrator guide on its web page http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/. And the debian documentation page has a lot of information http://www.debian.org/doc/

I don't know on other distributions, but it seems that the documentation in mandriva (linked from http://www2.mandriva.com/support/ ) is pretty good as well. Especially the advanced guide http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/.

I believe people never thought aout going to the main page of the distribution and click on the suport/documentation link.

That's the doc-linux-text package in debian which install the HOWTOs in /usr/share/doc/doc-linux-text/HOWTO/.

By the way, debian also links to a desktop user/administrator guide on its web page http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/. And the debian documentation page has a lot of information http://www.debian.org/doc/

I don't know on other distributions, but it seems that the documentation in mandriva (linked from http://www2.mandriva.com/support/ ) is pretty good as well. Especially the advanced guide http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/.

I believe people never thought aout going to the main page of the distribution and click on the suport/documentation link.

Thanks for the correction. In fact, Mandriva Free 2010 is available right here. :)

(which was in a released version of Mandriva before apt was in a stable release of Debian)?

Wait, whaaaa??

The first Debian release was in August of 1993, but yes not with dpkg.
Dpkg/dselect/apt was in the 3rd or 4th debian release which was in 1995.

The first version of Mandrake was released sometime in 1998, an entire 3 years later.
The first version of Mandriva was released even after that!

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html
http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/backgrounder

it means "both architectures, but just a base system with no software whatsoever, although the installer pretends to have it

Which it would, as the intention is to use it for a network-assisted install. It is mainly intended for people who are familiar with the distro, so it isn't even listed on the comparison page.

Either way, running Mandriva Control Center->Software Management etc. should allow you to quite easily come right.

it means "both architectures, but just a base system with no software whatsoever, although the installer pretends to have it

Which it would, as the intention is to use it for a network-assisted install. It is mainly intended for people who are familiar with the distro, so it isn't even listed on the comparison page.

Either way, running Mandriva Control Center->Software Management etc. should allow you to quite easily come right.

My main objection is simply that it doesn't have a vanilla (x)nethack package

If you file a bug with component "Package request", it is possible that this objection could be removed ... nethack_falconseye is available in contrib though, so you might want to motivate (what the differences/features/benefits are).

That's not true.

There is the One edition, which is a single CD, meant to be run as a live CD, or can be installed.

There is also the Free edition, which comes as a DVD, or as multiple CD's. It has to be installed to run it. It doesn't contain any proprietary drivers or software, but you can choose to install them - i.e. you will be prompted to install either the free nv driver, or proprietary nVidia driver.

The 3rd option is PowerPack, which you have to pay for, which contains proprietary drivers and software - i.e. a commercially licensed DVD player.

There are other commercial versions available for firewall, enterprise servers etc. Check it out yourself!

http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/11/04/mandriva-linux-2010-is-out/

http://www2.mandriva.com/downloads/

That's not true.

There is the One edition, which is a single CD, meant to be run as a live CD, or can be installed.

There is also the Free edition, which comes as a DVD, or as multiple CD's. It has to be installed to run it. It doesn't contain any proprietary drivers or software, but you can choose to install them - i.e. you will be prompted to install either the free nv driver, or proprietary nVidia driver.

The 3rd option is PowerPack, which you have to pay for, which contains proprietary drivers and software - i.e. a commercially licensed DVD player.

There are other commercial versions available for firewall, enterprise servers etc. Check it out yourself!

http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/11/04/mandriva-linux-2010-is-out/

http://www2.mandriva.com/downloads/

I tried to install Mandriva 2010, but aparently its installer doesn't think my SSD is a harddrive...

Please don't forget to file a bug. Thanks!

FWIW, Mandriva is still selling their Enterprise Server product.

kde 4 really kicked mandrivas usability... I currently use 2009 Spring and kde 4.3 is a big improvement over older kde 4 versions, but quite often I regret switching from 2008 Spring. many features, that worked in 2008 spring are now broken

• akregator and kmail now have problems with some servers

I've been using kmail quite a bit, and haven't had problems. I don't use akregator much ...

kile and kate's scripting feature don't work anymore

I think it should be back in KDE 4.4, but this is of course an upstream issue.

kaffeine can't handle non-square pixels anymore, so DVD playback is stretched on my 16:9 TV - and my bugreports are just ignored)

i get errors from PulseAudio all the time

dragon player is working quite well for me on KDE 4.2 on Mandriva 2009.1. The only thing I am missing in dragon is a decent playlist.

I cant mount encrypted harddrives at boot-time, not even with initscripts or using crypttab (i have to mount them manually after booting

If this is your bug, it may have workarounds for 2009.1, and is fixed in 2010.0 by the switch to plymouth (splashy was the cause in 2009.0 and 2009.1). If you have a different bug, you need to provide means to reproduce it ...

the one thing that's really improved is kdenlive)

I tried to install Mandriva 2010, but aparently its installer doesn't think my SSD is a harddrive... although all previous mandriva versions installed on it just fine... maybe I'll switch the ports where my harddrives are plugged in - that may change something, but then again i'll have to reinstall grub manually (mandrivas bootloader repair tool never worked for me)

I didn't try 2010.0 on my Acer Aspire One, so I can't comment here, but I didn't see any bugs filed on this.

mandriva 2009 was completely unusable with kde 4.1...

Which is why KDE3 was still available for it, unlike other distributions that were released at the same time.

about new gentoo releases?

According to the release engineering page, there was.

Someone should post a story everytime they emerge --sync && emerge world

No, otherwise people running Mandriva cooker should post every time they 'urpmi --auto-update', or people running Debian testing should every time they run 'apt-get upgrade', or users on Fedora rawhide every time they run 'yum update' (ok, for Fedora, maybe not *every* time ...).

Just because you compiled it, doesn't mean you got it sooner than anyone else. (Note, the Mandriva build system is currently not accepting build submissions for "cooker" as cooker is still in freeze, the build system will be back to the usual 50+ packages per day by the end of the week).

I am happy to not need to spend countless hours each year chasing infections out of my computers. My attitude would be like yours if I had to suffer as I did when using Windiz, worse if I still did it for a living as you do. Your users should not have to know of or bother with malware solutions. The same lazy ignorant customers could use Unix or GNU with human nature & without exposing gaping holes to evil intentions. Users not paying protection money to partially close holes designed into all Windiz products is not the reason for malware success. Poor design & bad intentions in Redmond is the cause. After 3 new designs, Windiz in still bait for trouble, meanwhile Unix & GNU just get better, even with Apple topping. Open office does all I need on any OS I use and does not corrupt the registry like M$off. If start time of OO was an issue, I'd allow quick start to run. Yes, OO has wrecked some formatting of documents that had had repeated conversions to RTF, doc, html & odt formats. Same as in M$off, quick cure is saving as a text file then formatting in your favorite format. I do not prefer M$ format that supports malwares. My Thinkpad T60, 2 GHz 32 bit system boots XP in 80 seconds, uses 390 MB RAM plus 725 MB virtual memory just to run a stripped, minimal version of XP with no user programs running, not even email. Compare that to full Linux in 42 seconds using 170 MB without swap memory. My AMD & Nvidia, 2.4 GHz 64 bit system boots 64 bit xp in 50 seconds to desktop then continues to flog HDD for 10 to 20 more seconds and needs over 610 MB to run plus any programs I don't run on it. But that is just a curiosity as I have no need or desire to use any M$ programs. Picasa, OO, Firefox, Esword, Thunderbird, card games, all are available in Windiz & GNU versions, so why use Windiz? Maybe just to support the botnet? Same 64 bit computer loads Linux full versions, in 40 seconds with no swap memory used. Been watching my systems use 299 to 515MB with Linux and full desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird,laser & inkjet printers, OOWord, OOCalc, about 6 windows open. That with usually no swap memory. One time, after 300 MB of software install, one had 214 MB swap (virtual to you) memory in use. Curious how you find a current Linux that does not auto install all the hardware drivers you need for your hardware. My 4 computers all require getting drivers from maker, Redmond does not supply all drivers needed. Lacking any pre 2007 computer, Lacking any bottom end hardware like celeron, sempron or dell, I have no way to begin to test your claims of lacking drivers. I do use Knoppix or other Live Linux CDs to test Windiz computers. Live Linux always finds all the hardware in good order, so Windiz is the problem in every failure I isolate. Regardless, your claim that Linux only fully installs on hardware no longer supported by your chosen OS seems a poor arguement. Full screen flash for me is on Linux & 1920 X 1200 screen. And it does look bad as any compressed 400 X 300 video stretched to full HD size. After you wasted 25 minutes & >$100 installing Windiz 6.0, how much more time & $ for new M$off & new anti malware programs also? My less than 25 minute Linux installs include all the office software except Thunderbird. If you will try a current version of GNU, I suggest http://www2.mandriva.com/ for a download of Mandriva One in no arch version. That version has software for proprietary formats and does not require separate versions for or knowledge of 64 & 32 bit systems.

Well no one is forcing users to upgrade! People can stick about for a while and see how it goes for others.

Also we just released Mandriva 2010.0 (release notes and Errata). The mirrors are currently syncing and the main download page is waiting for that to complete before offering direct downloads but the torrents are out now..

IMO Mandriva offers excellent Gnome and KDE flavours, so feel free to take the most appropriate "Mandriva One" live CD for a spin.

Well no one is forcing users to upgrade! People can stick about for a while and see how it goes for others.

Also we just released Mandriva 2010.0 (release notes and Errata). The mirrors are currently syncing and the main download page is waiting for that to complete before offering direct downloads but the torrents are out now..

IMO Mandriva offers excellent Gnome and KDE flavours, so feel free to take the most appropriate "Mandriva One" live CD for a spin.

Well no one is forcing users to upgrade! People can stick about for a while and see how it goes for others.

Also we just released Mandriva 2010.0 (release notes and Errata). The mirrors are currently syncing and the main download page is waiting for that to complete before offering direct downloads but the torrents are out now..

IMO Mandriva offers excellent Gnome and KDE flavours, so feel free to take the most appropriate "Mandriva One" live CD for a spin.

Well no one is forcing users to upgrade! People can stick about for a while and see how it goes for others.

Also we just released Mandriva 2010.0 (release notes and Errata). The mirrors are currently syncing and the main download page is waiting for that to complete before offering direct downloads but the torrents are out now..

IMO Mandriva offers excellent Gnome and KDE flavours, so feel free to take the most appropriate "Mandriva One" live CD for a spin.

Check out Open-AudIT and see if that's a start. It pulls a heckuva lot of WMI info and stores it nicely. Haven't tried it on Linux yet, hence posting AC.

I also want to check out Mandriva's Pulse.

"You can expect to get yourself into distro wars, but arguing from the Slackware side rather than Ubuntu side."

There are no Distro Wars, only minor peasant skirmishes of no consequence to The King. ;-)

That's not a new idea at all. Mandriva already does that and it has been doing that for years. I mean, since the days of Mandrake 9.2, I believe. That means since the days of Ubuntu 5.04, now that it appears that everything linux has been somehow reduced and limited to Ubuntu.

It's probably not that safe/secure, if the 'admin' can't login to verify the update actually worked,

Well, the output of the log file that gets emailed to the user account would verify the update. You wouldn't need root privileges to view that and assuming whoever is in charge of grepping through it does their job, it could be possible that no updates have failed. I generally run my updates through test systems before going into production machines.

or periodically check the update didn't unexpectedly do something stupid like leave a world-writable executable (that a critical program runs in a privileged context from time to time).

In mandrake, msec is installed as a base tool. It can be loaded adjusted and loaded in other distros with some minor work but I believe that there is already something similar in most other distros. For instance Ubuntu has Tiger, Denyhosts, and tripwire, which are all likely to be able to be installed on other distros as well as other tools like SELinux.

Now don't get me wrong, and please understand that I'm not saying a system set up in this way "will" remain secure. I'm saying that it is possible to remain secure for quite a while without the root passwords and there can be situations where years go by before anything or anyone needs the root password. Distros will usually drop support for the distro (unless it's debian which seems to take 10 years to move the stable branch to unsupported. Or it did a few years ago) before a well secured *nix box gets compromised. Scripts to provide reports covering all you mentioned and probably more have been and can be set up in almost any distro. One of my favorite distros has been doing it since 1999/2001 for addon options and base installs. These scripts can be enough to maintain a reasonable level of assurance that everything is fine and the person reviewing them doesn't need a root password at all. I am also talking about Unix/Linux systems, not a windows box. While something like this may be possible in a windows box, it is less likely to just work without a root password or the Sudo equivalent.

Add additional support like Snort, properly configured firewalls, umask set up right and so on, years can go by before anyone ever needs the root password.