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Mandriva Linux 2006 Review Continued
Anonymous Coward writes "The second part of the extensive Linux Tips for Free Mandriva Linux 2006 review has been published, going into details about the state of Linux hardware support and compatibility, hardware configuration and software with a whole section on digital photography. Part one was previously discussed on Slashdot."
I'm not making a stab at the quality of the article here, but this seems to be like a little bit of self promotion. I mean, http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr? http://www.when.was.this.in.style.com? And the poster comes from the website.
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Please don't mod this up or down, I'm just saying that I find there's something wrong with how this story got on
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And you are a conspiracy theorist. Check my post earlier: Free.fr is just an ISP offering free hosting, the Website creator just used the domain name to create a pseudo "vanity host". Nothing wrong. Quite funny, in fact, who would ever pay for Mandrake tips anyway? :)
Now, Mandriva is one distro with it's act together. No text-mode installer or arcane package manager syntax for Mandriva - it's the *easiest* distro you'll ever run. But that comes at a price, because it's also *hardest* for a developer to create an interface that's a smooth, seamless uh.. $EXPERIENCE than it is to just make the damn program work already and slap the command line interface on it with a shell script wrapper.
Not everyone, I'm still on Mandriva. I know everyone says it's just for new people, but no one has given me a reason to switch: SuSE's YaST screws up hand-edited config files, Fedora requires much more set up to get running, and Ubuntu--why? Slackware and Gentoo just don't make sense for a laptop user who upgrades frequently. So why the beef with Mandriva--what's the downside? Everything they write is GPL, too.
Besides, Mandriva has a fairly good community, as I'll demonstrate here by reiterating my offer to provide free email/IM support to any Slashdot-reading Mandriva user (or potential switcher). I'm not a kernel-hacker or anything, but I have been using it on desktops, laptops, and servers for 4 years now, and I can fix most things when they break.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
For those who want to try this brand-new version, ISO images (CD,DVD, mini-CD and live-CD) of the 2006 have hit public FTP mirrors last week-end (note: the x86-64 version only comes as a 3-CD and mini-CD image). Tip: right after a fresh install, don't forget to apply all security and bugfixes updates if you want a secure and stable system.
Download mirrors are listed here.
All 2006 reviews have been summarized here.
this is a perfect example of what's wrong with the Linux desktop
... a warning
...
No, this is a perfect example of what's right with the Mandriva desktop.
Mandriva pops up a window when you connect a digital camera to give you the option of importing your photos
Except you're completely wrong, which just shows that you were modded by anti-Linux zealots.
It pops up a dialog when you connect a USB card or when you see the camera as a USB storage device.
If you actually access your camera by its protocol or PPTP, it won't pop up a dialog because obviously, Mandriva knows that there are photos on it.
It's great there, because then it guides the user to the photo managing app.
Great! But the title bar reads "Warning". No problem for us geeks, but now, think Grandma
No problem for Grandma either, as she will see the big friendly warning icon, which :
- is not red
- does not contain a cross
- looks like
I'm pretty convinced your rant is a red herring, as most people will look, in order, at :
- the icon
- the big bold text in the dialog
- what's written on the buttons
- eventually the text in the dialog
There's a big chance they will never even see the dialog had a title.
What is she going to do when she gets a warning? Will she think that an error has occurred? Perhaps.
No, she sure as hell won't, as the first thing her eye will catch is the icon, which sure as hell do not look like a frightening error, but just a friendly warning.
That's why these dialog boxes need to have the polish and unified feel that they do on XP or OS X.
Which they have
In case you did not know, these dialog icons are stock GTK icons (not even Gnome, GTK !!).
If you talk about the mix of GTK and KDE on Mandriva desktop, please remember that even some MS apps have not the same toolkit on Windows than the rest of the desktop, and have exactly the same problem.
For example, some security dialogs of WinX SP2 are completely out of place compared to other dialogs. Or look at MS Office. Talk about "unified feel".
you'll be up and running before you even get mandrake^H^H^H^Hriva iso's downloaded
Actualy, it will be faster to be up and running with Mandriva.
You can either download only one ISO image, or you can download the 12MB ISO for a network install, with fully GUI installer and all. I believe that debian netinstall ISO was around 85 MB.
This way, you can start installation after just downloading and burning an 12MB ISO.
And as for the software available for Mandriva, you have 12306 packages, plus the PLF packages.
So, right now, both Debian and Mandriva have more or less the same (very high) number of packages readily available with urpmi (CLI) / rpmdrake (GUI)
Peace