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MandrakeSoft's Status Update
joestar writes "MandrakeSoft today posted an update letter from its CEO about the company's health. Among other things, it's interesting to learn that the company seems to be on the good track to go out of the "chapter-11 protection" before the end of the year, that it's taking part to several publicly-funded research projects, and that Mandrake 9.1 is having a good success. They also thank for the warm support they received from the community. Worth a read for all Mandrake fans, like myself. Viva la Mandrake!"
mandrake, imho is the best desktop linux there is. installation is easy, and it's much more user friendly than the more advanced linux distributions out there.
long live mandrake!
> You bought shares in a company that tries to sell something you can get for free?
:-}
Evian, Vittel and Perrier are doing quite well actually. Thank you for your great comment
I have bought Mandrake , not because i had to but because i chose to. Even thought we all accept that Free Software mainly refers to freedom of speach , we always use the "free as in beer" part. .. i have paid a truckload of money for MS and thought it reasonable in the past. Now that i found something that i actually enjoy, will i let it die?
I bought Mandrake because i believe i should support a company that contributes to Linux.
I could have copied or downloaded it, but i thought that if everyone did that then there would be no Mandrake (and indeed they were close). Can anyone guess how the Linux world would be without the Large Distros? No. Linux would not disappear but much less people would make the step of trying it and less people would use it as a platform , consequently less people would write software for it.
So buying you Linux is not a curse. You don't have to. But when possible, support your vendor.
I mean
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
They all have good and bad points. It is annoying to install a distro and be missing something that was nicely set up in another. 9.1 has the best combination I have seen. Mandrake seems to be the best mix of not too easy and not too hard. Everything works the way I want it too. There is a wonderful community site Mandrakeusers.org, that is friendly and a great source of info. Texstar provides excellent add-ons through urpmi. If I want eye candy or some helpful command line program (like unrar), it is simple for me to get.
I don't find Mandrake 9.1 makes things too easy for me. I don't feel babied, but I do feel sometimes I save time. I hope the company does well. I find it to be a great distro, and I have tried a lot of them.
Thanks, Rich
Mandrake is much more polished for the desktop than redhat. MDK has urpmi, basically apt-get for rpm, a seriously useful tool. The other drake (gui/console) tools are great too. Mandrake may have started as a branched version of RH, but it's definitely taking the lead now. Release 9.1 has proved to be very solid. I run it both at home and the office.
Redhat tends to lag far behind with their releases. You can thank RH for changing standard locations of files too. They are starting to suffer from all the incumbencies of a large corporate.
Having said that they are both basically the same, and you can add Susi to the list. The main thing these distro are based on is RPM and how they group their files into packages. Both target the desktop and server markets. RH has been very successful in establishing its name in the corporate world.
My main concern is that I am starting to hear "Redhat" mentioned more than "Linux", and sometimes interchangeably. it's all about perception. Business is starting to think that Redhat is the only choice !