Interview with Mandrake Linux Founder Gael Duval

mcleodnine writes "In this interview Gael Duval comments on MandrakeSoft's just released financials. He also comments on his decision to base Mandrake on Red Hat (over Slackware), the timeline for getting out of Chapter 11, the recent UserLinux manifesto and barriers to acceptance for Linux on the desktop."

Comments

The problem with Mandrake is all the damn tweaking

[Gilesx]

When I was new to Linux, Mandrake 7.0 was about the first distro I used (if you don't count the week I spent wrestling with Corel Linux).

At first, it was great - most things I wanted to do were prepackaged and I spent days booting it up, marvelling at how different to Windows it was, writing myself sticky notes and then rebooting into Windows to play games.

However, as I began to take Linux more seriously, the problems of Linux began to become apparent for me.

Firstly, it always felt really "non-standard" to me. I'd jump on irc groups for help and nobody could really give me advice that applied for Mandrake. One thing in particular that I remember was an issue with runlevels - they were entirely different to even distros that were cousins of it, ie. Redhat - why would anybody deliberately change runlevels? I just can't see a good reason for this.

Secondly, with every tweak they made (some for functionality, some for ease of use, some for ...well..just being different) something else seemed to break, and these functionalities often caused off the shelf RPM packages, and even source code, that really should have been expected to function, to fail miserably - not such a big deal for me now, but back then, I didn't have the first idea how to resolve the problems.

Thirdly, as I moved from version to version, I was finding many small bugs and percquliarities. Certain things didn't work in certain places, video card drivers wouldn't compile, odd messages appeared here and there. On their own, not major issues, but the sum of all these minor headaches was irritating to say the least. With every distro, I had a wishlist of things I wanted to work, not complicated but simple things. With every release, I was able to cross many items off of these lists, but then instantly replaced them with more. Once again, you have to wonder how much of a hand the "Mandrake tweaking" had in this.

For me, the final straw was the Mandrake 8 series. After installing, I experienced an unprecedented number of bugs. The technologies behind the distro were improving, but at an equal rate, Mandrake was appearing less polished and reliable with every release. What I found even worse was the fact that it seemed incredibly biased towards KDE. In fact, the new setup wizards actively steered you towards choosing KDE as a default environment. IMO KDE has been vastly inferior to Gnome since Gnome 1.4, in terms of bloat, speed and appearance (KDE did - and still does - look too much like a geeky windows rip-off for hobbyists), and I objected to having to work really hard *against* the wizard just to get my desktop the way I wanted it.

At that point, I made the switch there and then to RedHat, and have not been happier since. Mandrake *is* a really nice distro to install, and does try hard to accomodate those with less Linux experience. However, I really don't see it as a "heavyweight" distro. It'd be nice for my parents to use to check their email and write a letter or two, but I really can't imagine the power users lining up to use it.