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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."
asked him why they can't create an easy to use distro without requiring developers to release a "Mandrake" version of their software.
OH YEAH!
CmdrTaco's post violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. CmdrTaco aborted.
Am I the only one who thinks that giving technological infrastructure (Operating system, compiler and particularly cryptographic source code) to our enemies (ie: muslims, asians, arabs, africans and other terrorist nationalities) is a Very Bad Idea?
Nice marketing answer. What about one of the freely distributed and supported rehashes of redhate? What about SuSE? What about tipping your hat to one of your competitors doing good work, instead of giving one of the typically evasive answers that we expect from fud-spreaders like gates, and proving you're a big man(tm)? Whatever happened to CEOs who respected the entreprenurial spirit? Now they're all marketdroids.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just look at yourself! Where's your pride? Where's your dignity? What would your mother think if she could see you now? Begging for karma in the streets like a common whore!!! You need to respect yourself, my friend. Saddam Hussein looked more dignified when they pulled him kicking and screaming out of his hole.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently the GNAA confirmed that Sir Haxalot accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of karma-whoring posts. Coming on the heels of the latest Slashdot survey which plainly states that Sir Haxalot has lost more karma, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along: Sir Haxalot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent First Post comprehensive trolling test.
You don't need to be an Anonymous Coward to predict Sir Haxalot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Sir Haxalot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Sir Haxalot because Sir Haxalot's precious karma is dying. Things are looking very bad for Sir Haxalot. As many of us are already aware, Sir Haxalot continues to lose karma bonuses. Negative mod points flow like a river of blood. There can no longer be any doubt: Sir Haxalot is dying.
All major surveys show that Sir Haxalot has steadily declined in Slashdot popularity. Sir Haxalot is very sick and his long term survival prospects are very dim. If Sir Haxalot is to survive at all it will be among pityful moderators. Sir Haxalot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Sir Haxalot is dead.
Fact: Sir Haxalot is dead
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.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Now THATS dedication!
bcuz GNU/Debeeen LiinOOCKS Ro0xxXXorZZZ!!!111!!!
Bruce Perens
Sir Suxalottacock was whoring, few liked it. FOAD cumvacuum.