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Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

Anssi55 writes "As most of the Mandriva employees working on the Linux distribution were laid off due to the liquidation of Edge-IT (a subsidiary of Mandriva SA) and trust in the company has diminished, the development community (including the core developers) has decided to fork the project. The new Linux distribution, named Mageia, will be managed by a not-for-profit organization that will be set up in the coming days. There are already many people that have decided to follow the fork, but the people behind it are still welcoming any help offered in the various tasks related to establishing the new distribution."

5 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Name by future+assassin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do OS developers and other free software creators always pick user unfriendly names. When ever someone who knows nothing about free software/linuix asks me what free alternatives they could use I get a weird look from them when I tell them about Thunderbird, Firefox, Ubuntu, Amarok, Gimp and etc...

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    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    1. Re:Name by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes because Excel, Powerpoint, Quicken, Maya, and Twitter are so much better . . .

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      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    2. Re:Name by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One Word: Trademark.

      its really hard these days to come up with useful names these days without infringing on another companies trademark. ESPECIALLY if you want to go international.

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      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  2. Go Mageia! by 12357bd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Mandrake/Mandriva has been by far, the best KDE oriented linux distro, amd one the most user friendly. I hope Mageia keeps the good things on! Go Mageia!

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    What's in a sig?
  3. Re:Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu by Urza9814 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a former Mandriva user (now on Arch) - there is very much a need for Mandriva to continue. It's the distro I always recommend to newbies, and as far as I know it's the only distro that is both extremely user-friendly and has excellent hardware support. I've seen far too many people give up on Linux because Ubuntu didn't like some piece of hardware. For a newbie's first Linux distro, you need to have at least basic support for _all_ hardware straight from the install. I've never seen Mandriva fail at that...and I've also never seen Ubuntu succeed.