Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Finally Out

ennael writes "We finally did it. Mandriva Linux 2010 is out and comes with many improvements and innovations. We still go on supporting in the same level of integration GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.2. Support for netbooks is improved as users can now easily test Moblin 2.0 environment. 'Smart desktop' coming from European research is now fully integrated and is the first real working semantic desktop. Mandriva Control Center also brings improvements in tools: a new netprofile management tool, a GUI for Tomoyo security framework, and parental control. A big thanks to our community, who worked hard and made this release possible."

Comments

I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us.

[TihSon]

I have been using Mandriva since the days of Mandrake ... 8.1 specifically ... and frankly each time I have tried switching to any other distro I always find myself coming back. Not that the other distros are bad, but I honestly think Mandriva has the hardware detection down cold, and has been routinely better than any others. When the 'buntu showed up I tried switching, and every iteration had a deal breaker. I stopped trying at the LTS edition. Today the only other distro I use is Zenwalk, not some mainstream hotshot like Suse, fedora or Ubuntu.

I guess I am asking, why is it that such a good, arguably superior, distro seems to have to pull teeth just to get a few scraps of publicity, while some others seem to be living in some sort of reality distortion field?

Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us.

[onefriedrice]

I guess I am asking, why is it that such a good, arguably superior, distro seems to have to pull teeth just to get a few scraps of publicity, while some others seem to be living in some sort of reality distortion field?

It's the name. Ubuntu is fun to say. Gentoo is fun to say. Suse and Fedora are fun to say.

Mandriva is painful to say.

Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us.

[greatica]

I've used Mandrake/Mandriva a couple of times too. Ironically enough a number of computer science peers jeered at it, calling it "n00b Linux".

You know, because we should all embrace distributions that are a pain to get working properly.

Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us.

[RAMMS EIN]

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I can share my experience.

Back in 2001 or 2002 I bought a copy of Mandrake Linux. I had no Internet access (because I just moved) and I needed something for my new laptop, and I'd heard good things about Mandrake. I was sorely disappointed by it. It was heavy (taking a lot of disk space, memory and CPU time), and, apparently like every RPM-based distro at the time, had broken package management and bad quality packages (Mandrake managed to gain some fame for being unable to run Wine, for example).

I am sure Mandrake/Mandriva has improved since then, but it's been too late to keep me. I've discovered Debian, where time spent on system maintenance is minimal because its package management works, its packages work, they have a larger collection of packages than any other distro I've seen (meaning less time spent installing from source), and I feel safe upgrading my entire system in the expectation that everything will still work afterwards.

Even if Mandriva now provides all these things, that wouldn't compel me to switch, because I already have everything I care about.

I suspect it is the same way for others: either Mandriva doesn't offer compelling enough advantages over their current OS to make people want to switch, or people have had bad experiences in the past that make them want to avoid Mandriva. The fact that the project seems to have difficulty getting new releases out and the company behind it has been close to folding probably doesn't help, either.

(Just to be perfectly clear, none of this has anything to do with the technical quality of today's Mandriva. I am not saying it isn't an excellent product which deserves more attention. Just trying to explain why it isn't getting what it deserves.)

Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us.

[Anonymous Coward]

For the time being, I wish aficionados would stop pretending that Linux-on-the-desktop is ready for prime-time.

I don't say that to anyone, I fully understand that people have different needs and different hardware.

I will say this: I get to choose the hardware I use and I know what to choose (or at least I have well-informed cow-orkers I can consult). As a result everything that I need works out of the box: audio, video, wireless, hibernation, power management, flash, etc. (ok, I admit: I added debian-multimedia.org as a software source, but that's it).

Based on this totally anecdotal evidence I tend to believe that the major problems -- things that prevent using the system -- are specific to certain pieces or combinations of hardware. That will be fixed if the operating system is sold pre-installed so someone (Dell, Lenovo, ...) actually makes sure the hardware specific bugs really are ironed out, just like they do with Windows.

Complaining about many of these problems to distro engineers may work for a specific problem, but it seems clear to me that the way forward is for the hardware manufacturers and integrators to start testing things on more than one operating system -- otherwise new hardware will always have these problems: the distribution engineers can only fix problems after the fact, and that's not enough. This is a chicken-and-egg problem of course, but I'm confident that there is a breaking point ahead after which linux testing becomes the norm instead of an afterthought.

The rest of the problems you mentioned may be show stoppers for you (like I said I do understand people value different things), but my guess is that they really aren't critical to most, or at least many, people. However, these usability problems (say, ugly fonts or bad default apps) are something that distribution engineers can improve on, much more so than driver problems.

-Finally- out?

[atheistmonk]

It isn't even 2010 yet!

Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or take your argument to its logical conclusion and just run Windows - the real de facto desktop winner?

Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"...

[Adam Jorgensen]

...needs to be shot. Mandriva is still the best desktop linux distro out there. Ubuntu is made of fail because it loves Gnomes. OpenSuse is made of fail because it's full of clunky "enterprise" (Another word for "crap") admin stuff. Fedora is made of fail because RedHat is more interested in RHEL than anything else. That leaves Mandriva. It's fast, it's free (Despite OP might think. Hint: Try visiting the Mandriva website and clicking on the Download link...), boasts great repos, wonderful configuration tools and is all round a top noch desktop experience. It's what I use at work because I need a distro I can rely on to install right, work properly and not throw up a fuss when it comes to installing software, playing music and getting things done.

Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"...

[petrus4]

Mandriva is still the best desktop linux distro out there. Ubuntu is made of fail because it loves Gnomes.

The Ubuntu using moderators are really stretching, here. How exactly is this Offtopic?

Canonical are the collective village idiot of the entire FOSS community. Whichever members of the Lloyd Christmas demographic who use it and get mod points here, can mod it down as much as they want. They won't change the fact, and the fact is this:-

Ubuntu and Debian are both unmitigated garbage. I just installed Arch this morning. The install took three hours, and had none of the problems which I had constantly for six weeks with Ubuntu Intrepid.

Sound? Just works, with ALSA. Considering how bad my experience was with Intrepid, I was amazed.

Video? Nvidia drivers; just worked.

X? I could install whichever window manager I wanted at the outset, which means I wasn't left with struggling to either live with or somehow uninstall the rancid fecal matter that is GNOME.

No kernel panics. No flickering. No sound dropping out. It just works.

Mandriva was a good distro too, last time I used it.

I'm fed up with Ubuntu users. If it was just your obscenity of a distribution that was a problem, I could cope with simply not using it. That isn't my biggest issue, however.

You insist on lying and engaging in denial about everything that is wrong with it, and suppressing complaint about said problems in any way you can. I know how this post is immediately headed for -1, and the reason given doesn't matter at all, does it?

Go ahead; do it. Bury what I'm saying here, and what EVERY ONE else, other than you, is saying about Shuttleworth's miscarriage of a distribution. Ubuntu is falling apart. Karmic was supposed to be a fix for Jaunty, and now it's giving everyone hell to the same degree.

You can't bury the truth. You can either keep burying your heads in the sand until Canonical go under, and Mark Shuttleworth ends up potentially worth nothing more than the shirt on his back, or you can actually start trying to change things.

Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"...

[jimicus]

I wouldn't describe Debian as unmitigated garbage - if you use it for a server you have no need of a flashy GUI or top-notch video and wireless support and it excels there. That is, after all, the core focus of Debian.

Ubuntu, OTOH - I can take it or leave it. I've spent the last two days wrestling with Ubuntu myself for a specific project and I'm just about ready to jack it in and run Mandriva.

Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no point in trying to have a reasoned discussion with petrus4 about some issues, in my opinion. It seems that if something (Debian, GNOME, FSF, Ubuntu, Wikipedia, whatever else) has flaws, it is always an unmitigated disaster without possibility of salvation and anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial and a group-thinking sheep.

I like a good argument and the guy probably has some points hidden in there but trying to discuss things from that starting point... pointless if you ask me.

Back to the point: I use Debian as a laptop distro myself and it works wonderfully (but then again, I am probably in denial). I used Ubuntu for a few years in between but went back to Debian because Ubuntu just seemed to break more than they fixed...

Re:Am I the only one who cares?

[Simmeh]

Budweiser and Coors are popular? You must be American.

Re:Am I the only one who cares?

[IrquiM]

I know a lot of European girls who drink those brands!

Re:Am I the only one who cares?

[somersault]

Seems like even if only 10 people had issues, most mindless dotters would jump on it. What is the big deal with wanting to slag off Ubuntu? I really don't have any problems with not having to edit config files just to get my basic system set up. I don't have problems with editing config files either, I work as a programmer, and I enjoy highly configurable systems. Ubuntu is still much more configurable than Windows or OSX. I don't see what other things need to be configurable that I couldn't change if I wanted to. As far as being a desktop OS is concerned, it seems pretty much as close to perfect as anything I've ever used.

The sad fortune of distributions...

[tjstork]

I remember when, for a time, Mandrake was -the- Linux to get. Now look at them, practically off the radar.

Re:Mandrake lived and died by RPM

[buchanmilne]

Mandrake lived and died by RPM

As much as Debian died by dpkg, in other words, not at all. I guess you didn't try urpmi (which was in a released version of Mandriva before apt was in a stable release of Debian)?

Mandriva's not even run by the guy that founded Mandrake. So everyone that remembers the old Mandrake should remember that this is just somebody else with sorta the same name doing the distro now.

So, when no more founders of Microsoft are employed by Microsoft, they should change their name, or their customers should consider switching?

What really made Mandrake, and continues to make Mandriva, is not one person, but the combination of employees and contributors. While many of both have come and gone, a lot of the contributors from the Mandrake era still use and contribute to the distro, and new contributors join quite often.

If you bothered to look, you would probably find that Mandriva is more open than Ubuntu or Fedora (not sure about "Open"SUSE).

Re:Am I the only one who cares?

[mcgrew]

I learned long ago arguing over what Linux disto is best is like arguing about the best beer. Each one is unique and appeals to certain people.

Even moreso than with beer. My favorite beer is Killian's, but it costs too much and not many bars here carry it, so I usually just settle for Busch. With a Linux distro, price doesn't enter into the equation.

Some distros may work better on some hardware than others, some may lack features you need, if they lack features you don't need (but somebody else does) it's a non-issue to you, but not to them.