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Mandriva 2011 Out
shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of."
...it was in fact a useful distro, it was compatible with most computers on the planet, all kinds of exotic hardware, I absolutely loved it.
But then it became Mandriva (aka Mandrivel...), economical support issues, fleeing contributors, and the support for obsolete hardware was coming apart until the distro became completely useless, first to fail was basic SoundCard support, even the soundblaster series...that worked fine under the Mandrake distro name...failed on several basic issues...such as...SOUND! -_-
One of the most wonderful things about Mandrake was that you could almost get 3D out-of-the-box, an Nvidia installer was just a click away *kind of like ubuntu today, but Mandrivel...? Things that worked before...broke, again because of the competent contributors fleeing (something about certain benevolent leaders...)
Ubuntu is going the same ways these days with UNITY, more splitting than unity if you ask me...everything is about tablets & touch screen, everyone wants to be modern...but what is modern? Have we forgotten all about functionality?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
They are targeting hipsters?
Mandriva isn't trusted by the community, that is why they forked it and named it Mageia, mainly to keep it from going under and to head for a new direction.
Use it because it is more stable than Ubuntu. Use it because it's not trying to shove junk packages you don't need, like Ubuntu does. Use it because you have the balls to stray from your mundane little group of popular branded products, unlike Ubuntu users. Use it because it has prettier wallpaper.
Or, you know...don't. No one really cares.
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no it doesn't, it shows 2 themes on the parent link, the dark them is what you see in your link
I've got no beef with the way Ubuntu, GNOME 3, KDE 4 work. If that's your cup of tea then still give Mandriva a try, you may in fact like it.
Real quick I want to address one thing...
Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often.
Mandriva will have an LTS option hopefully by the end of this year. Tour of 2011
Politics in the Mandriva world have played out to start emulating the Ubuntu release cycle sans the two a year release. Instead we will see a normal Mandriva release once a year with regular patches for 1.5 years after release. Starting at the end of this year will be the LTS line. No word on how often a LTS will come out but 2011 LTS will receive patches for 3 years.
Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?
I would dare say that one of the big things that has held Mandriva back is KDE. Mandriva 2011 supports KDE only, no GNOME mess here. KDE's polish over the several iterations since the 4.0 disaster really shows here in Mandriva. Many things are being addressed and there are plans to make normal GTK+ applications more KDE friendly (like how SuSE has made their firefox integrate into KDE nicely.) The biggest thing I think is that Mandriva understands that a lot of people are getting annoyed with the sudden changes in favorite applications and desktops.
The standard kicker is replaced with a Mandriva specific kicker that I think is a good compromise between modern and classical application menus. Amarok is not present in this release, instead is Clementine, which is loosely based on the Amarok of 1.4 days. KMail (and everything it brings) is not present either, instead is Thunderbird from Mozilla. LibreOffice 3.4 is used, which I think is the best version out there thus far and the most useful for day to day operations. (side note:) A few Windows users at our company were switched off of Office 2007 to LibreOffice 3.4.2 and have had really great results in their day to day operations; so much so, we may be moving them off Windows altogether. The users only need TN5250 emulation, Microsoft Exchange support, modern web support, and an Office suite that can connect to DB2 and do Pivot Tables.
Finally, the package manager is what I would call sane for most Linux heads. Yeah it's not dumbed down like the Ubuntu store but I think most people will enjoy what they see here. Overall Mandriva 2011 offers a desktop that I think will rival Ubuntu. With all the compromises that they have made with KDE between new hotness and what we all enjoyed from the Linux desktop pre-Mac OS X copier era, I think this distro will start to fill a ever-growing niche of old school Linux users that enjoyed DE as they were.
That's one thing I would run into - installing any Linux would either give me the network card or the wi-fi not recognized, or it would give me a package manager that would throw in dependency hell. Which is why I've not found a satisfactory distro to date. Ubuntu was nice, but just wouldn't let me install on a clean drive - I had to have Windoze on it first.
These days there are plenty of Linux Distros that realize that if they can tell you what the dependencies are, then perhaps they should offer to download them for you.
And these days, Redhat is one of those distros. yum is an integral part of the RPM package system on modern Redhat-based distros.
And in general... software publishers that provide proper support for the OS will either provide their own yum repository with their special dependencies, or depend only on software that can be installed from a standard yum repository (generally preferred).
Although on Fedora, indeed, you might occasionally run into RPM dependency upgrade hell, due to having inconsistent versions, if you install certain beta-quality packages.
On Rehat Enterprise Linux / CentOS installs, I never ran into dependency hell with Yum, except when something really odd I did caused it (e.g. when I installed a package from a 3rd party yum repository, force installed a package against warnings, then disabled that repository).
You mean like pushing various web services like what is planned on http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00484.php For example, rosa sync, a help desk client, etc.
You can always try Mageia. There are several people working on both the GNOME and KDE side of things and you should be in very familiar territory if you have previously become accustomed to Mandriva.
For getting the shit done, the best interface is still toilet.
It certainly can't be that many if they need to drop anything but KPW as available and supported desktops...
I wouldn't call dropping everything but KDE as proof that they have very few contributors left. SuSE includes GNOME but officially supports KDE, Slackware dropped GNOME long time ago and doesn't include them at all. GNOME 2 was tricky to build and maintain. GNOME 3 is in, "I don't even know" land. GNOME with all of its dependencies, vast array of configuration options for each dependency, and magic order of build instructions for each dependency; does not tend to be easy to maintain a workable tree from source. A couple of people have built build systems that do nothing but build GNOME. Thankfully, most builders have given up on their own build systems and have gone to JHbuild.
KDE on the other hand is a pretty straight forward process to maintain a working tree. You can check it out here. Of course, that's something that the average user isn't going to do but there again we are talking about Mandriva. They have to maintain a working tree of the DE and still include their things. GNOME/KDE aren't targeting a single distro, they are making a DE for whoever. Distro have to take that and add and remove what works for their distro. To do this with GNOME is almost like putting stitches in yourself. KDE is very easy to customize distro-wise.
Red Hat and SUSE are successful because they have stuck to a single and coherent vision for their brand of Linux, because they have a good sales model that pushes support for their brand of Linux, because they have played major roles within the Linux community in general which attracts community contributors to use and support your distro, and because they have had strong word of mouth within the community.
Mandrake had that as well, but as you can tell from some of the comments here on Slashdot, that all changed with when they purchased Conectiva. I don't know if they got inflated head syndrome or what, but the quality of software and the number of upstream contributions began to cool quite a bit. Bug reports were not being followed up by Mandriva engineers and the community wasn't taking up the slack either, so bug reports would go on for months and months with no answer. Hardware support issues abounded as not incredibly smart defaults were chosen, the most famous (infamous) example is the decision to ship the distro with the main volume on mute.
The distro has had its hard core followers and commercial users who have stuck around, but as I noted in my last post, the politics behind the distro have played out into two things: Focusing on KDE alone and better release schedule. Those two things will make it easier for the community and Mandriva to support the distribution.
Finally, you have to remember that we are talking LTS for their free product. If you are a company you can purchase their "enterprise" Linux which has a different support cycle than the community version. Also, Mandriva has forty-five engineers to date, most of them are in Brazil (which by the way is very KDE heavy country.)
They have good updates, excellent repositories, and a system that is both fairly cutting edge and quite stable. In other words it works and works well. Rarely do you ever need to go hunting beyond the official repos except to get unfree stuff that is ALL well supported in the PLF repos (which have a nice simple web interface that will set them up in URPMI with a couple of clicks). I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around, install stuff from various 3rd party repos, deal with dependency hell, etc. Haven't had to deal with any of that with Mandriva in quite a while now.
OTOH there are some downsides. URPMI isn't quite as slick as some of the APT based package managers, and French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess. Still, there's plenty of expertise on the net to solve any issues, the documentation exists, it is just badly organized.
Mandriva the company seems to have lost some of its steam in the last few years, but they are still pumping out an excellent distro. After using it as my primary desktop OS, internal server OS, and on numerous laptops for 10 years I really have no major complaints and see no compelling reason to switch. SUSE is the only other distro that supports KDE even half as well, and I'm just not that interested in switching to Gnome. Mandriva does what a distro should do, does it well, and will serve most people's needs quite well. I wouldn't run it on production servers only because it is a pain in the arse to leave off the desktop packages entirely for some reason, though it will WORK fine.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I've mainly used their pxe server for booting eepcs to install mandriva. To be honest with you, I doubt that they've done much work at all in improving it for 2011, especially since thin clients aren't all the buzz anymore. I think most of what your seeing are the leftovers from their cluster projects. I did notice that they have meta packages(tasks) for clustering now, which I've never seen before.
You'll probably have to manually set up an image to boot. From there though, it looks like urpmi could be easily adapted to providing distributed copies of the applications for faster loading.
Also, when I said thin client, I was thinking of diskless clients that still ran the programs locally. I know that theres a lot of commercial solutions these days for small scale linux "thin" client setups, running 4 to maybe 20 or so desktops off of one computer. But I think most of these bypass the whole client and are basically hardware dongles that attach to one computer with I guess really long cords.
Unfortunately, if you want something more modern you'll probably have to do a mostly custom setup. The easiest thing I could think of would be to use the older version of GDM that supports remote computers logging in easily, I think 2.20 but not sure off hand. I didn't have much of a problem getting it installed in 2010. Haven't tried in 2011 yet. I'm sure it works better than 20 vnc connections. Then of course picking a simple theme and desktop like lxde, or rox.
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