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

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

[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

[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.)

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

[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.

Sure. More the merrier

[abhishekupadhya]

The world could use one more distro.

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.

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: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.

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.

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. :\