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Mandrake 9.2 Initial Review
joestar writes "Mandrake Linux 9.2 was released yesterday, and a first review is already available at ofb.biz! It focuses on the new desktop-oriented Mandrake 9.2 flavor, the Discovery, a 2-CD office/multimedia product for beginners which comes without any server capability. It seems that a new competitor to Windows is born, and according to Tim Butler, 'Another key to making a distribution novice friendly is insuring that everything works out of the box, and Mandrake Linux 9.2 succeeds there.(...) To the best of my knowledge the only other distribution presently including the Radeon drivers from ATI is Lindows.' Waiting for reviews of 'real' Mandrake 9.2 products (PowerPack, Corporate Server...), this review is nevertheless quite comprehensive and very interesting reading, and this new Mandrake Discovery thing should do well with the public, at least as an office desktop affordable solution in corporations."
XP is the "latest greatest", and it's down right stable compared to 9x/ME.
/. about a non-biased study which claimed that KDE is pretty much just as easy to use as XP.
.. but for people who just want to check their e-mail, surf the web, look at pictures of their grand children, listen to mp3s etc. I can't really think of any reason to justify them switching to Linux. No matter how easy it is to use.
Simplicity has nothing to do with anything. XP really isn't that simple to use, at least compared to MacOS, yet Windows still has the majority of the market share.
There a few reasons people use Windows:
1) It came with their computer.
2) They have no reason to change.
3) Everything imaginable, just, plain, works.
I'll elaborate on point #3. Devices, apps, games etc. You can walk in to any Staples or Best Buy and pick up any piece of software or any printer, digital camera, mp3 player etc. bring it home, plug it in, insert the cd-rom and presto! it just works.
Even if Linux is a million times faster and a million times more stable and has a replacement application for every common windows app if you take away that one little piece of convenience you may as well forget it.
KDE and Gnome are very windows-like and any person who's been using a Windows computer for more than a year will pick up how to use those two desktops with very little effort. I'm even reminded of a recent article published here on
Yet why change? What's the problem exactly that Linux is supposedly able to fix? Stability? I'm running XP right now and I've had more hardware issues than software.
The only thing I can really think of that Linux offers over XP, for non-tech users, is security and the ammount of free (as in cash, not beer) software that's available for it.
I work professionally as a UNIX admin right now. I deal mainly with Linux boxes, though we have some Solaris. I used to use Linux exclusively on my desktop, and to this day I wouldn't dream of using a non *nix OS at work. I can think of millions of advantages that Linux has over windows for coders, web developers, sysadmins and anyone who's really techie and likes to hack at their computer.
Now don't get me wrong. There are hidden costs to using Windows, such as MS licensing, the MS tax etc. Considering that I do look forward to the day when Linux is installed on every new desktop PC being pushed out of Future Shop and when every single device will work on Linux out of the box, ditto for games and apps. But until then I just can't see recommending Linux to anyone but my techie friends.
- Garett
The idea of releasing the isos two weeks early to the club members was to give some kind of a benefit to those who've actually bothered to support the development of the Mandrake GNU/Linux distribution.
They could've gone the other way like SuSe and many others (Lindows, Xandros and so on) - make a small insignificant bit of their distribution non-free and let no-one download the isos, but they wanted to try something that would keep the whole distribution free, right according to the GNU philosophy.
They decided to trust that their club members would hold off distributing the isos just for the short time of two weeks. In my mind that would've been the decent thing to do. Limit the leeching a bit for a very limited time period and create a little incentive for actually giving something to the company that has done all the work.
Moderators, could you not mod this down?