Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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