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Mandriva Buys Assets from Lycoris
ulteus writes "For months after the acquisition of Conectiva, Mandriva moves further with the following announcement: "Mandriva today announced an agreement to purchase several assets from Lycoris, a major North American Linux distribution for home users. As part of this agreement, Lycoris' founder and CEO Joseph Cheek is joining Mandriva to develop a new and advanced Linux desktop product.". This is exciting for all Mandriva and Lycoris users, but I'm wondering: who's next?"
"For months" -> "Four months". Sorry!
It isnt one of the top20 distributions. It typically hangs at around 50th on the distrowatch rankings. Here is the distrowatch page for lycoris.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
You have not heard of Lycoris before because they are indeed not a major Linux player. I used them for a while, but the hardware support was lacking. Amazingly enough, their product had a strikingly similar look and feel to WindowsXP, but it never took off. When I did side-consulting, I tried to get about fifty of my customers who were looking at new computers to try Lycoris. forth-eight of them said "No" after taking it for a test drive. While it looked like Windows, it wasn't Windows, and that was what they wanted on their desktops. Sure...they bought a lot of Linux servers from me, but the desktops remained Windows.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
However personally I don't like Mandriva's general look&feel. Some things look cool while others suck. Their website looks as if it was drawn in Paint back in the old Win98 days. There's no easy way of installing software like apt-get install foo or yum install foo. Or having segfaults all the time while using Mandrake 10.1. Or having to use KDE 3.2 when 3.3 is out just because the guys have screwed something up and nearly made a fork of KDE (or why did it take so long to stay up to date?) Hope they'll learn how to make their products look really professional, that's probably one of the main reasons which keeps me from using it. And is Lycoris Debian-based or does it use RPM?
According to docs at the Lycoris site, they used to be called "Redmond Linux" and News Forge has a late 2001 review of a beta of Redmond Linux. Founded as Redmond Linux in 2000, they changed their name to Lycoris in January 2002.
Couldn't find a history to see what distro it might have originally forked from.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The base of Lycoris is...wait for it now...CALDERA OPEN LINUX. As in The SCO Group.
This was something that had to happen after the SCO v. IBM blowup sometime or another. I stopped recommending Lycoris to friends and family after the SCO lawsuit, and I suspect I was not alone. Poor Joe Cheek was stuck in the middle of all this.
Mandriva is a good distro, and Joe Cheek is a really good developer. He created a version of Linux that was really good for retraining people with Windows on the brain. Maybe Mandriva will do a "Mandriva Switch" sub-distro geared to the same audience as Lycoris.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
... well, that doesn't really matter does it? You want a searchable tag/label based system, so why not consider the package database as such a label view - you can see all the programs on your system with ease through the "package label" view of your filesystem, does the physical location really matter that much to you?
It's actually pretty good at what it is - a means to package a diverse system that can be tailored to the user. Things like Smart (a Conectiva/Mandriva project even) and Autopackage help a lot. To get the packaging systems you want you need to fix #4, and I don't think that's likely to happen (at least not successfully).
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
Really? Any program that actually supports the freedesktop.org desktop entry file is readily accessible to the user unless they use some WM or DE that doesn't bother to use them - which means they've gone out of their way to complicate their lives. As for where the programs are stored on disk
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
To some extent I agree, but we're dealing with legacy here... even OS X and windows have some odd folder locations and names carried over. Besides, there's always GoboLinux, which I presume you already know about.
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
This is the big one really. If you want a fixed mandated core set of libraries that the user is forced to install... well, grab yourself a nice mandated controlled system like OS X, because Linux probably isn't what you're looking for. In theory you could just set up a distribution that has such a guaranteed base set of libraries, and in a sense some already exist - try Linspire, or Xandros. The catch is that people write applications for "Linux" not "Debian, stable" or "Linspire 3.1" or whatever. Given a random open source application it will make whatever assumptions about libraries it cares to - it's up to the packages to make sure those dependencies are met. FOSS applications tend to be coded against "whatever system the developer cared to use" rather than specific distributions and versions. Commercial developers maybe? Well they do have requirements - Oracle requires particular versions of Redhat in standard installs. Other commercial developers can do that if they like. Alternatively they could accept that the Linux world is a diverse world and restricting yourself to the one distribution that is guaranteed to have everything you want where you want it is a little limiting. You can always use Autopackage and handle the dependency issue elegantly in a way that's effectively invisible to the user.
The fact is that different distributions are different. You seem to be asking for all (or most) of the distributions to agree on a firm fixed set of base libraries. Distributions are different competing companies often however - you may as well ask Apple and Microsoft to hammer out a combined base set of libraries that you can be guaranteed to get in both OS X and Windows. Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe CoreImage on Windows and DirectX on OS X is what you'd like to see. I'm not so sure it will happen though.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
"about 2 years ago they were in bankruptcy,"
...
...
No , not at all , They where in Judicial protection , someone whas playing with there stock and some of there former deal made by incompetent Manager ( Poole , Le Marois ) where being owed and they where unable to repay them at that time also they where getting sued for the use of the name Mandrake.
Judicial protection is 2 step above bankrupty protection.
"but what I've heard, their desktop was even better"
No not at all
"I hope they decide to do business under the Lycoris trade name. "
Why would they switch name to a loosing company name when they have one evrybody knows by now
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
I have recently made the jump from Win98 to Mandriva 10.1 and it was a surprisingly pain free experience. I have installed other distros in the past and after a while ended up paving over it with Windows for one reason or another (generally one of the reasons above). This time I don't see any reason why I would go back. My system is far more stable, robust and dare I say easy to maintain that it was as a Windows based system. Granted that my geek quotient is somewhat high, but if you take into account that my wife, my 8 year old and 4 year old are using it as well you cannot say it is incredibly difficult.
I am preaching to the choir on Slashdot and my point is not that Mandriva or any other distro is superior for its ease of use. My point is that traditionally all these were excellent reasons why the average computer user would not use Linux. I think that these are now no longer necessarily valid reasons. In my most recent experience:
- Install fast and easy, I went from windows to XWindows in an hour or less, and my computer is a Duron 700 with 128MB of RAM.
- Directory structure is not familiar but the majority of what I use was already set up for me in XWindows so I could use it out of the box and dig in deeper later.
- Free support is only a Google away.
- I have been able to find and install RPMs and archives of what I need. When it is not on the CD I have been mostly successful finding it and installing it. What I have not been successful compiling/installing would not be considered common sofware and I would not expect to get it running under Windows either.
I recently read In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neil Stephenson. It is now 6 years old but I think that it explains the phenomenon better than I can.