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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?"
I'm not sure that too much consolidation is good for the Linux market. I like the diversity available in the multitude of distros out there. Microsoft supports will probably argue that that is a weakness, but in reality it is one of Linux's greatest strengths ... something-for-everyone rather than one-size-fits-all.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
We are seeing the very same consolidation of the commercial Linux vendors that happened back in the late 1980s with commercial UNIX. Indeed, it will be interesting to see where this leads.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
My recent upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1 is riddled with problems, will this aquisition actually change the distro, or do the people who download FREE versions of the distro get screwed? I noticed that some software in RPM format asks you for a disk you never got in the download version, its almost why I switched from Windows in the first place all over again!
:)
Needless to say running this Distro in 128MB of RAM is not recommended.
Since I still have a Mandrake club membership, I might give the new version a whirl, since the font rendering and desktop stuff from Lycoris looks interesting. I seriously doubt they'll get away from the bloated, buggy mess they've turned into.
I think it's definately a good thing that Linux companies are joining forces. Until now, the only major Linux companies have been RedHat, Novell (Suse) and lately Sun. If one puts one of these companies distribution to a solution offering, the customers atleast have heard about these, and with good luck they have good image about them.
In my mind Mandriva hasn't had that image. Few years ago they allmost went to bankruptcy. After that, I have to confess, I haven't been able to trust them. But now when they are merging with other Linux companies, it seems that they have got new blood in their veins. I have been looking their Enterprise Server offering with interest, and if they keep expanding and making their brand more known, their offer will become lucrative. Until then, I will continue using RedHat as the primary OS for production use.
And to those that think that it's bad that there will be less players, I have to remind you that you can allways fork if something goes into a bad direction. To me a future where there would be 3-4 well known and stabile Linux companies with dozens of noncommercial distros would be a perfect situation: innovation and competition together with option to have a stabile offerings.
Cheers to Mandriva!
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Not really. For one reason: Who is this critical mass you talk about? Their are 4 generealized groups of PC users that are relivent to the linux world that we want:
1.)Current Linux users, these guys are set and probibly wont go anywhere any time soon
2.) Buisness class users that use windows
3.) Educational users that use windows
4.) Home users that use windows
3 & 4 are typicaly the same, and are considered the "critical mass" since their are more in this group.
The problem I see is not linux but the DE that comes with it. The average person will not care one bit about what linux does, because thats the way it is with windows. That is the main problem with DE's today, you have to worry about what linux does too much for it to be useable to grandma and grandpa. Once you make it that seamless then you have the stuff you need to go after the critical mass.
So now you will ask me:"How does this effect the reason why consolidation is good argument?"
It isnt distros that need to consolidate but more of an interaction with each other and with the DE makers.
To beat Microsoft in this arena, their needs to be more of a weaving between the DE and the kernal. I could be wrong and the only way this can happen is consolidation. This is my view, but most likely I am looking at things wrong.
Mod at will, but I think it's on-topic to make a shameless plug here for the distro project I'm a part of, GoboLinux, since the entire point of the distribution is to make the radical changes to Linux that we consider necessary for it to overcome the problems you listed.
/usr on NFS, etc. These days we have more advanced methods to deal with this, such as UnionFS, but those legacy paths are still there, complicating the overall structure of the system.
/Programs/[name]/[version] (not like Windows where parts are under windows/system, in the registry, etc.). With this total modularization, we don't need to maintain a database of "what belongs to whom", and it also gives the user a better view of what's in his/her system, and how are things organized.
:) It's a live CD (which can also install to the HD).
1. The packaging system is user-unfriendly.
Yes, and that is because in regular distributions, you have a "list of packages and dependencies" and then the actual files scattered through the file system, and those are held together by a database of some sort. The fact that in the actual filesystem you can move single files around, overwrite stuff regardless of the package list, etc. leads to loss of syncrhonization and corruption of the packaging control system.
2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
True, and that is because of traditional Unix conventions created to deal with stuff such as
3. The folder layout of Linux systems is user-unfriendly.
That is the heart of the matter. Changing the directory layout is how we addressed problems 1 and 2 in GoboLinux. We organize all data each program under
4. The lack of a standard base of installed libraries is application (and thus user) unfriendly.
This is indeed a problem. In GoboLinux, we apopted a small standard "base" set (inspired by Linux From Scratch) which we then build on. This helps, but standardized "frameworks" of libraries would be a good thing -- note that desktop environments like KDE and GNOME do this to some extent.
So, if you want to take a look at an actual implementation of these ideas, give GoboLinux a go.
The filesystem is the package manager