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Review of Linux Mandrake 9.0
CoolCat writes "It seems that Mandrake 9.0 has been surpassed or at least catched up by the latest versions of Red Hat and SuSE. OSNews has the review of the new Mandrake version and they have hit a number of bugs and problems. In fact, a number of Mandrake users in the OSNews comment's section agree that this release has been buggy and not a big step from version 8.2 or their competition. I use Mandrake for years and I really hope that the next version will bring us back the good ol' Mandrake we knew..."
GREAT review. RIGHT on target.
At last, someone had the *guts* to come out and write about all these happenings.
I have switched to Red Hat 8 since Mandrake 9.0 was released.
yeah, works great for me, too...and it's running on a pretty old laptop.
this person is on crack. "oh, I knew that I couldn't boot off of an xfs partition, but the installer didn't warn me!!" what the crap? I'm booting fine just fine off of an xfs partition. lilo doesn't read the filesystem (which is used by default in mandrake), and even grub has xfs support.
anyway, take this article with a big jug (the kind with the metal spout) of salt:)
I decide to go back to redhat - 7.3 is better than 8, IMO, but neither one has the crashes or hangs I saw with Mandrake 8.2.
XML causes global warming.
- Not Eugenia
I was bitten by that bug. I selected a different mouse, when it loaded the driver to test, the mouse didn't work. Instead of reverting back to it's previous state, the mouse continued to be screwed up no matter what I did... Until I rebooted and started over.
I agree competition is good, but I disagree when you write Mandrake has fallen behind RH or SuSE! Recent move of RH and SuSE on the desktop hide the fact they have limited knowledge in this area while Mandrake has worked for years in this area. The latest Mandrake provides a great user experience, and very automated settings, but at the same time, an experimented user will never be frustrated because with Mandrake you can always get more options if you need them. Furthermore, I'm sorry but RH & SuSE have just a new look (even if RH has _unified_ the look&feel), whille Mandrake provides _real_ desktop options such as supermount (transparent access to removable medias) or the dynamic desktop. These features _really_ make user's life easier, it's not just vaporware like SuSE or Red Hat.
My wheel mouse requires moving the mouse wheel a lot, with the cursor jumping all over the screen. Then it suddenly gets everything reinitialized and it starts working properly.
It's been that way in Mandrake since 6.0ish. Not one iota of difference in this bug in all that time.
She must like trashing linux, Mandrake this time, even though she gives it 8/10 and 7/10 marks with few positive comments in the article, and compares it to Windows(tm) for Ease of Use(tm).
Strange. When I installed Windows ME it was a real-pain in the Buttocks(tm). NT2000, and XP are "better" but come with what she probably considers "crappy" default themes, no compiler, other Window Managers (Explorer).
And she mentioned Slackware! I thought she was some kind of User Interface guru, knowing what is best for Joe User and such.
It is like comparing Apples and Oranges and Watermellons (in no particular order).
Slackware makes an excellent rescue disk. The other distos...not so much, and Windows, get a Clue(tm).
"Well, you bought all those smoke alarms, and we haven't had a single fire."
-Homer Simpson
Eugenia Loli-Queru, reviews are very PICKY, and i find them sometimes leaving stuff out or just a rant session.
MDK 9.0 has built in support to join MS domains in the installer, real clean works great.
she didnt even know antil a post posted it,
i would take her review not as a final word but:
"with a grane of salt"
her hardware and setup a far from normal,
and she installs the os one time on ONE machine and that become the """"review""" of it.
she should install it a few times ussing different
methodes each time and fully explore the OS, taking in to account the target of the OS, and other factors. and not just some multi page rant like some idiot.
the more a read Eugenia Loli-Queru the i find her
lacking, to be fair, some stuff she says is REALLY good,
but some stuff is really BAD.
MY 2 cents
end rant
Nex6
I thought after all the problems they had with 8.2, they'd clean up their act. Their excuse on the Cooker mailing list for the quality of 8.2 final was "publisher deadlines". Maybe they need to get another publisher who understands that if it ain't ready, it ain't ready?
I haven't participated in Cooker development since the 8.2 betas. I got fed up with trying to contribute because they had no bug tracking system. All communication between developers and testers was on the Cooker mailing list, and it was sloppy and clumsy at best. Fixes were frequently overlooked and contributors got upset because they thought they were being ignored. During beta 2 I pointed out that the curl-config script was missing from the libcurl-devel RPM; during the RC I mentioned it again, and still it went to press without it. So I had to build my own libcurl to build an app against it. I had all kinds of problems just installing 8.2 final on my system; KPresenter always segfaulted on my laptop and wouldn't even start on my desktop; the Xenophilia RPM was entirely missing from the distro because they "forgot" to commit it; and countless other problems. So I went back to 8.1.
Lots of people on the Cooker list were calling for Bugzilla, but the developers insisted that the mailing list works just fine. Can anyone tell us if they've come to their senses? If not, the heck with 'em.
I think I disagree with youm and agree with the parent more. While Mandrake isn't exactly in the dark ages, it is losing it's edge as the desktop leader a bit. RH8, and those desktop distros like Lindows, Lycoris, and Xandros are getting their distros to look more like unified operating systems, and not overwhelming the user with options. While Mandrake isn't as bad as some, it's still the breed of Linux we saw around 2000 and 2001 whe it started taking more ground. Now I thing we are seeing it go further with distros like RH8, Lycoris, Lindows and all those, and I'll bet Mandrake 10 will be along those lines as well, or maybe it will stay the same and join the ranks of Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo to become an old schoold hacker oriented disto instead of a begineer desktop one.
Haven't had a lot of time to play with M9.0, but if it isn't ready for primetime, M10 will be.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
I don't know what she's done, but my logitech wheel mouse works without any problem in my own mandrake 9.0 install. I think I did scroll my wheel though.
- General UI crappiness - inconsitent layout/design, confusing menus (to a NORMAL END USER, not us geeks), multiple settings locations (really i despise this about all modern linux distros). She praises the few that get it right though, such as red hat with bluecurve (according to her at least).
- Stability Oh yes, 'linux' crashes. Sure we will say no it is just X that crashes but does the end user care/know? No they don't, and no they don't want to go into console to kill x and start it over again, instead they will just reboot. To be honest X crashes more on me than Win2k/Xp. Doesn't mean I don't like X any less just an observation.
- The Many and Varied issues with X - The most common of these, and the one that makes me shudder with hatred, is the only way to change your refresh rate is by going through and editing a set of
.conf files (yes, yes I know this was just added to the CVS tree a few weeks ago but it isn't here now now is it?). This is a feature windows has had for nearly 7 years now! . Also, some of us use fixed-frequency monitors which means our computer is unusable until we can get through and edit these files. Personally my SGI monitor will work for about 10-15 minutes at 60hz (needs to run at 85hz) before shutting off. I hate having to go in and edit these files where as with windows it is a few clicks away. And many, many more problems. Not that X doesn't do some things great (terminal server anybody?) but it isn't perfect by any means.
- Too Many Programs - us geeks love having 13 web browsers. Other people would rather not care. She makes an excellent point with respect to the 7 terminal clients included with Mandrake. 7???? 1 or 2 at most, leave the rest to be installed by those who want them.
I think people who hate Eugenia's reviews the most are those who are unwilling to admit the huge flaws present in most linux distros today. BTW, I use debian at home for my desktop (apt-get rocks my world), it's not like I love windows but it does do quite a few things better than linux. And some things alot worse for that matter.This was a big problem I remember when people were trying out the release candidates 1,2,3 with Mandrake 9.0. I assumed that this problem had to do with people (newbies) trying to burn the isos on 650MB CDs. But I'm not sure... It was a non existant problem from what I remember, when I was beta-testing 9.0.
This is what Debian strives for. I'm not sure if their user base is climbing though, in proportion to Redhat/Mandrake/etc..
It's kind of a nice equilibrium actually. Mandrake/Redhat are always pushing the bar, getting new software out there to the users in a packaged RPM format, which helps the actual developers make their software better because they can get feedback from those users. And Debian polishes packages up until their are ultra-stable and then moves them from "testing" to "stable". So users, as a whole benefit. There is a freedom of distribution...and at the same time software is being improved upon and features are added.
I should say that I upgrade my linux distro but rarely (I skipped 8.2 entirely), mainly because I know it's going to take me a week to reconfigure everything exactly how I want it, and rebuild much of the software that I use from source. I therefore don't expect to be able to stick a fresh distro in the CD-ROM drive and have the "best linux ever" smiling back at me half an hour later. And I should say that if I went to re-install windows (at least Win98 which is the "latest" version of windows that I personally have experience with - I haven't used windows for years :) I wouldn't expect to have everything working first off either.
What I can say is that - having spent a week tweaking and re-compiling - Mandrake 9.0 is a big improvement for me. It's fast (yay gcc3.2!!) and seems extremely stable for the most part. While I have encountered some bugs - not the ones mentioned in the article, mind you - they've only been fairly minor ones. The only major problem I had was that the new drakfont didn't like installing some Windows fonts that I had extracted to a folder ... but I just got drakfont from my old Mandrake 8.1 and it works fine :)
It seems that there are always bugs in new releases, especially the .0 releases (redhat 7.0 anyone? and what about this recent story on RedHat 8.0). BUT ... the thing that's different with this particular Mandrake release is that it had no less than four Release Candidates, not to mention (I think) about three betas. Why weren't these problems picked up?
And the only answer to that, I think, is that a lot more people need to get involved in these beta releases and report these bugs. All of those complaining now (and I guess that includes me :) should have tried out the betas and made sure that the newbies - who don't instinctively know how to make things work - weren't faced with these silly, needless bugs.
I hope this isn't redundant and you folks need to realize that I haven't kept up with this woman, but from what I've seen, she really just don't know what she's doing in some places. From her review on Gnome 2 and her experiences with Gentoo, it seems to me that she tried to tweak things her way and blames the system she's reviewing when she messes up.
Just an observation.
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Lets see, new gcc, new glibc, new KDE and GNOME. yeah i think this deserves a new major release number.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Just so you know, apparently KDE runs faster on Mandrake 9.0 than on Gentoo. Check out this thread at Gentoo's forum.
-- Kircle
I was mostly refering to the actual use of the OS, not the instalation. For most disrtibutions, the istall is usally easy, and I like Madnrake in that respect. I don't like the overall feel of the OS, but that could be due to using Mac OS x on a daily basis and every thing else is just inferior. :)
Red Hat has better usability, intuitive menus and Open Office integration. The Blue Curve theme is also great. The Red Hat Network, enabled at every boot, is a pain.
Mandrake does a better job when it is about integration with peripherals, like digital cameras an PDAs. And RPM Drake "just works", compared to RHN, that requires registration.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
When Mandrake set up hurdles for reporting bugs my first though was, "well, if they don't want to hear about them, they ain't gonna find them, they ain't gonna fix them!".
This was an effort to cut down on people reporting non-bugs and taking up valuable resorces, apparently.
It took me a lot of searching throught their website to find the bugzilla and even more effort to be granted posting rights.
There are about 400 bugs in the bugzilla last I checked. I would have expected thousands for an operation this size. Mozilla has thousands because they actually welcome bug reports. If I report one it is usually checked within a few days as real/imaginary/dup etc. and most important, Mozilla is rock solid.
Perhaps spending valuable resources sifting through thousands of bugs for just a few real ones is actually quite a useful part of quality control.
apart from removing MySQL *sniff* it seemed to break quite a few confs. This wasn't really this surprisong as I didn't expect it to work in the first place.
So I decided to install this, now I only ssh into this box and it has no monitor / keyboard / mouse. Since moving country I didn't even have a mouse serial mouse for the box...
And before anyone comments that mandrake is a desktop OS balh blah blah if I'm going to use it for a server, blah blah blah, the disks were here when no others were
BTW German keyboards suck "QWERTZ" WTF is up with that? (ALT GR)Q to get @, jesus!!
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
I hate to be pernickety (hmm, that's a lie. I enjoy it and you know it), but catched was perfectly good English a few hundred years ago, until someone came up with the idea that it should work like teach / taught, and invented the new word 'caught'. Here in Scotland, the change hasn't been fully made yet, and people can still occasionally heard to say catched. Of course, this leads to whole new areas of how 'correct' English is defined, and whether the English of Dickens is what should be perpetuated. Personally, I'm all for change - but change, not ignorance (cf. loose for lose).
[FUCK BETA]