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Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community Ready For Download
joestar writes "The new Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community has just showed up on Mandrake's FTP mirrors and through Bittorrent. MandrakeClub Members benefit from extra CDs downloads and even a DVD ISO for Corporate Memberships! Another good news for the Mandrake community is an announce from Mandrakesoft that due to the stock resumed trading on Euronext on last Monday, with a nice increase of +10.00% in three days." Update: 03/11 06:23 GMT by T : Cheap ISOs are also available from merchants like OSDisc.com and CheapBytes.
Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years.
This guy is way out there
What Mandrake does is great; they produce a very nice desktop distribution, but it's no secret that their product tends to be incredibly buggy out of the box.
Let's hope this helps them improve the quality of their releases!
This could go on forever though. Including gimp and openoffice makes it even worse. Companies that put these out don't just wake up one morning and decide to compile and release their projects. It takes companies like mandrake a lot of time to put these together and test them. To make a negative about this release that it won't have bleeding edge releases of other software is kind of petty. Besides, most of their users won't care and the ones that do will update their software once the new 3rd party apps come out.
Yes, but just remember that it already has made several radical upgrades, such as KDE 3.2, Kernel 2.6, Glibc with NPTL, Community Release process. Its far too much to do that all in one go.
If you would like all that stuff, then there are other distros coming out soon, such as Fedora core 2, SuSE 9.1, Slackware 10, and don't forget constantly updated distros such as Gentoo.
The Open Source Community is always rapidly changing, if Mandrake had waited for those packages to be released, then some other software would be around the corner and you would complain about that instead.
You pay them money, they give you stuff (software, drivers) that they can't include in the download edition because it's not free.
Unless you're RMS, what's the problem?
I'm presently a Fedora user. I used to be a Mandrake user. I look at Mandrake as a distro that strives to be simple enough for a newbie/former-Windows user, but seems to lack good QA processes. I've followed Mandrake's releases enthusiastically for years (I think version 5(?) was the first one I tried) until I found that version 9 *still* took forever to automount data CDs. I'd put in a data CD, and Konqueror would freeze for several seconds (30+) when I would try to access it. And you know what this equates to for the average computer user? "Linux is slow," that's what. And that doesn't help anyone. Heck, I even gave Mandrake Move a try, and the problem's STILL there! Knoppix doesn't do it, so what gives?
Don't get me wrong; my whole world doesn't revolve around automount; it's just a good example of Mandrake's operations. I'm of the mind that if you're going to put a convenience feature in the software, for God's sake make it work right, or just leave it out! Like it or not, if you're trying to get Windows users to switch, you'll need a working automount for CDs--forcing them to learn to use mount on the command-line when they shouldn't have to is not an option if you're serious about user-friendliness.
Oh, and another thing that bugged me--they included this autorun program on the CD that would supposedly allow one to begin the Mandrake installation from Windows, but clicking the "install" button never did anything. Good way to persuade Windows users to use your product! Why even include it? Typical Mandrake. I posted this to the bug tracker (and found I wasn't the first), but even as of version 9--and I think 9.1--they still didn't fix it. So I never joined the Mandrake Club (I came close), and just stopped using Mandrake altogether, because it seemed to me they would probably never get their act together completely. Maybe now that they're trying to emulate Red Hat's business model they will be able to limp along a while longer. Right now I've got a Fedora Core 1 install that works great, and Mandrake is just something I'd rather forget.
I'm sorry if this info is of no use to anyone; mod me down as you see fit. Who knows, maybe all the stuff I mentioned is fixed in this new Community release? Maybe, but given Mandrake's track record, I doubt it.
You don't pay for those software, you pay to have someone put it together for you. Hack, if you are willing to wait, you don't even have to pay or you can go with Linux from Scratch project and put it together yourself.
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(Reiterating parent and replying to grandparent)
Indeed, Mandrake patches almost everything up the yin-yang so that what you get when they make a release really is about the latest-and-greatest you could have gotten. Granted, GNOME 2.6 looks pretty awesome, to the point where this KDE-only user wants to try it out for a while to see whether it still makes me feel like I'm trapped in a box. (Anybody else feel that way about GNOME? It's the best analogy I can come up with for why I always reverted back to KDE. Nothing personal, just my perception of my past experiences with it.)
But the main thing I would like to point out and have everyone else re-point-out, is that the Official release doesn't actually come out for a couple of months! At which point it will most likely contain KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6.1, kernel 2.6.5, GIMP 2.0.x and whatever else has come out in the meantime, plus a whole bunch of bug-fixes, etc.
But all that aside, I betcha you can't find another distro release that includes half of what Mandrake has managed to stuff into 10.0. It's gotten a pretty good run-through by the community already through all the beta and RC releases. I'll feel perfectly confident putting this on my day-to-day machine, and I'll be renewing my Silver membership shortly to help support a decent Linux company that puts out an outstanding product.
That's right, I'll be "putting my money where my mouth is". Anyone who wants the next release of their favorite distro to be better should do the same instead of whining that a two-week-old release of a hugely complicated product doesn't contain software that was released two days ago.