Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia

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."

Comments

Re:fuck

[Buzzo]

What the fork?

Name

[future assassin]

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...

Re:Name

[valros]

I think here user unfriendly means different, the reason so many other names are "friendlier" is because they've been used so many times before.

Re:Name

[MBGMorden]

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

Re:Name

[nurb432]

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.

Re:Name

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they are for the most part.

Powerpoint says something about what you do with it and conveys positive imagery - it's powerful, it's something you point at (a presentation). Excel - it doesn't really say what it is, but it conveys the idea of speed and success, which are important in business. Likewise with Quicken - they verbed an adjective (quick) that means something, and while potentially having some strange linguistic associations (quicken/quickening is the moment in pregnancy when a fetus' movement is first felt), that is not exactly an everyday word in the English language so the associations aren't very strong.

Maya has two common associations - it refers to the concept of the illusory nature of the world in the Hindu religious tradition, and it refers to an early central American civilization renowned for their relative scientific advancement - the former one, while not incredibly well known, is a pretty cool name for a 3D rendering package, and the name sounds good, not awkward on the tongue.

Twitter is an incredibly annoying sounding name in the English language. Not something I'd name a product I wanted anybody serious to ever use. But it is somewhat descriptive of what the annoying people do using this product - post small blurbs of inane content, like a bunch of giggling schoolgirls. So yeah, I don't love that name, but I see where it came from.

Now we come to Mageia. While it has a cool association if you are familiar with ancient Greek (magic arts, sorcery), I wouldn't have known that without looking it up, and I consider myself rather well educated and linguistically saavy. It won't trigger that association immediately, even in most geeky users, to be honest. But beyond that, the word formation is very awkward to pronounce in English. Worse even than "Linux", which suffered for many years from "I don't know how to pronounce it so it's awkward to discuss in a business context" syndrome, and is apparently still pronounced differently in the US vs. Europe (according to Wikipedia). Nevertheless, Linux is much less awkward to read or to say than "Mageia". But put together, "Mageia Linux", and it's pretty terrible sounding.

Furthermore, as some have pointed out, the name sounds out similarly to "my-gay-a" or "ma-gay-a" in American English. The word "gay" meaning homosexual but also now being a generic insult used by preteens to mean something that is stupid or just plain sucks - well, I can't see that being an association people want to make, particularly if you just heard this name pronounced rather than reading it and seeing it spelled out.

So I think it's fair to say that "Mageia Linux" is a pretty bad name indeed.

Re:Name

[tverbeek]

Excel and Powerpoint aren't great, but their main brand was Microsoft Office until they got brand recognition on their own.

Incorrect and backwards.

Excel and PowerPoint had both been successful stand-alone products for several years before "Microsoft Office" was conceived, as a bundle (with Word) of three popular, name-brand products at a lower total price. At the time, Excel had just overtaken 1-2-3 as the best-selling spreadsheet program, and this was an effort at coattails-style marketing synergy, as avid Word users would become Excel and PowerPoint users, Excel fans would switch to Word and Powerpoint, etc. What Microsoft would lose in revenue they'd gain in market share, a tactic that contributed to the decline of WordPerfect, Borland, and Lotus, and Microsoft's near-monopoly on commercial office suites.

This was around the same time that Microsoft started making "Microsoft" part of the official names of the applications, amalgamating its line of popular individual software products into a monolithic brand: not just "Microsoft's spreadsheet program, Excel" but "the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel". This went further as "Microsoft Excel" became "Microsoft Office Excel". (And if not for the anti-vertical-integration court cases, I suspect it would be bundled as "Microsoft Office Windows Excel" by now.)

Re:Name

[HiThere]

Interesting, I took Mageia as a back-reference to the magician theme that Mandrake used. Mageia, then, would be (freely adapted) the arts & skills of the Magus.

Sorry it didn't mean anything to you.

The problem, though, isn't when it doesn't mean anything, as much as when it means something you really don't want it to mean, the the Chevy Nova in Spanish speaking countries.
    (No va == "Doesn't go")

Fork of a fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Rememer that Mandiva was forked from Red Hat when it was Mandrake, and had bits of Connectiva too.

Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[xtracto]

Ahh open source... divide and conquer.

I recall Mandrake/Mandriva as one of the most user friendly distros when I used it... (IIRC around version 7 or 8).

In my opinion it would be really great if instead of doing another fork the Mageia developers tried to merge all the good features of Mandriva into Ubuntu.

I understand that Mandriva uses RPM and has several differences compared to Ubuntu, however merging both software would really benefit Ubuntu or better yet, Kubuntu (the chance to make it not suck).

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[Bigbutt]

Hell, I'm still using Mandrake. It's my firewall but still, I haven't had any problems.

[John]

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[rtfa-troll]

Traditionally, a proprietary fork has always been a bad thing. However, there's not so much evidence for that in open source. Most of the time the two forks take ideas from each other, both advancing faster till the stage where one of them stagnates and hands over it's features to the other.

From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).

Just because forks are bad in proprietary software doesn't mean the same here.

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[bigtomrodney]

I think it's loss in popularity has less to do with Ubuntu being what it is and more to do with how badly openSUSE fell apart in the 10.x releases. It went from being one of the most solid and user-friendly distros to failing its own dependency checks and making codecs more difficult to install. That was quite sad as it pioneered in taking the approach of providing codecs in the repos where they couldn't ship on the disc.

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[JamesP]

I would recommend helping openSUSE instead. Many technologies are similar and openSUSE is, in my opinion, one of the most nicely rounded distributions - it's just not the popular one.

Yeah, I wonder why.

Maybe because they don't come with repositories configured like ALL OTHER DISTRIBUTIONS out there, for NO REASON. And it's a PAIN to find the addresses, a PAIN to use Yast to pull from them (proxies, non intuitive dialogs, etc, etc)

That, and Suse smoked the data from my HD once.

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be stupid to try work with Ubuntu as they are not upstream friendly, they do not develope software and they do not care about the community. Mandriva was totally different when compared to Canonical.
Mandriva even is more user friendly at 2010.1 than Ubuntu is with 10.10 (beta). When it comes to handling a hardware, networks or multimedia, Mandriva wins. Only thing where Ubuntu goes around is the amount of packages and that goes in rare ones. Mandriva package repos had almost all what was needed, when just enabled the PLF repos.

Ubuntu is nothing. If ex-Mandriva employees would like to join forces with other distribution using DPKG, then it should be Debian. That is the force what actually keeps Ubuntu alive. Not the Ubuntu community or Canonical itself.

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[Bungie]

Mandrake was a very easy to use and user friendly release of RedHat Linux, similar to how Ubuntu is an easier and more friendly version of Debian. Mandrake had a good following back in the day and I remember it being very easy to use.

I think that it would be best if they do their own thing and see what they come up with, not only because their base distros are completely different but because they could bring in new ideas. I'm hoping Mageia will be able to come up with a fresh user friendly Linux that can be offered as an alternative to Ubuntu, for the people who don't like Ubuntu (for whatever the reason). For example, non-techie people sometimes get word about sound and wireless problems with Ubuntu, well hey now you can offer Mageia.

Re:Don't do it... join forces to Ubuntu.

[timbo234]

Maybe so, but these problems have been fixed in the 11.x releases. zypper works beautifully now, and fast too. And installing the codecs couldn't be easier: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats/11.3

Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu

[GodWasAnAlien]

Given the roots of Mandriva/Mandrake, perhaps merging with Fedora should be considered.

Or perhaps Ubuntu may be interested.

I don't think there is a need for this thing to live independently.

Re:Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu

[koterica]

There is always the question: Diversify or focus? However, we do not need redundant diversity. Basically, in order to decide if it is worth keeping a separate distro, we should determine if Mandriva had any goals that were unique. If not, by all means merge. However, if there is something unique about Mandriva (I haven't used it, I have no idea), than some effort should be made to preserve those unique goals. I am guessing that the people who are forking the project feel that it is worth keeping Mandriva alive as a separate project.

Re:Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu

[Xtravar]

A common misconception. Mandriva has always supported both KDE and Gnome. And it's always been better than every other distro at providing choice, ease of use, and development packages.

Hopefully if this Mageia thing takes off I can easily switch RPM repositories. Otherwise I suppose my installation is in jeopardy if Mandriva doesn't spring back up to its former glory.

Re:Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu

[Urza9814]

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.

Re:Why not just merge with Fedora or Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This never ceases to amaze me about Linux. If Mandrake has such amazing hardware support, why the hell don't all the other distros have the same level of support. It's all open source right?

Sure. More the merrier

[abhishekupadhya]

The world could use one more distro.

Re:Sure. More the merrier

[anshulajain]

Mandriva as a distro is pretty much dead. Mageia lives on as the "new Mandriva". It will end up being a replacement and is not "just another distro"

Go Mageia!

[12357bd]

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!

Re:Go Mageia!

[Arker]

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!

A very subjective statement - users of Slackware and OpenSUSE and even Kubuntu might disagree.

I havent tried it in awhile but it always aimed at somewhat the same audience as Ubuntu, only based on RH infrastructure rather than Debian, and defaulting to KDE rather than Gnome. It's good to have choices, even if that makes the assessment of 'the best' more difficult and less emotionally satisfying. For some this is certainly the best choice, and I too hope the distribution continues well beyond its commercial origin.

Re:Go Mageia!

[tronkel]

PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva variant which works beautifully on PCs and is indispensable to me for use on my netbook. Mandriva itself is also great on netbooks. A primary example, that illustrates that Mandriva makes an excellent base to build other distros on. Mandriva seemed to produce solutions that were a breath of fresh air in comparison to the straight-thinking Ubuntu. No criticism of Ubuntu intended here. It's also a big favourite of mine. Remains to be seen though if PCLinuxOs can still produce the goods independently of Mandriva. OK, Mandriva is one of many fine Linux distros out there - but it had a certain something when it came to thinking out of the box. I for one am sorry to hear this sad news. I hope the valued development traditions will somehow continue as a new incarnation of of the distro. If the developers are willing, this ought not to be a problem.

Re:And, the names get worse

[haruchai]

Also, that other Mandrake fork, PCLinuxOS is just as a bad a name - why didn't Bill Reynolds call it Texstar Linux? Calling a distro PCLinuxOS is like naming your dog BarkingMammal.

good

[onefriedrice]

Phew. I was beginning to think there might not be enough Linux distributions.

My eyes!

[MachDelta]

Goddamn, I skimmed the headline in my RSS feed and saw "Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mangina."
I really need to cut back on the caffeine. :\

Re:My eyes!

[Joe Tie.]

The only operating system endorsed by old greg.

Re:And, the names get worse

[TheSkepticCanuck]

Sit, BarkingCanineMammal, sit. Good dog.