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."

Comments

Re:Still alive?!

[slack_justyb]

Please note:
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.

Re:Mandriva isn't trusted by the community

[buchanmilne]

Horse shit. I use Mandriva on a number of critical systems, and I know many others who do the same.

[...]

I've already downloaded the new Mandriva, will put it on my test system later tonight, and will most likely upgrade a dozen or more servers over the week.

Long-time Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia contributor here ... I would warn you that in the past, a lot of server-related packages were maintained by the community (apache and php being about the only ones maintained by one over-worked employee). For a number of reasons, a lot of those contributors have become disenfranchised with Mandriva, and have been porting their work over to Mageia. Thus far, my packages are still in sync between the two, but recent events have been motivating me to rather consolidate my work on Mageia:

• New Mandriva employees making significant (bad) changes to packages which are officially maintained by a community contributor, without consultation.
• Lack of communication with contributor community, with sudden changes to the release plan (one month prior to the planned release, and after the original RC date - which is usually when version freeze kicks in - the release was moved out by 2.5 months). This makes it quite difficult for contributors to plan their contributions (e.g. I put some effort into getting my packages up-to-date for the May freeze date - during times when I had lots of other responsibilities - only to have my effort effectively wasted).
• Lack of commitment to support of development infrastructure - there appears to be little internal support for the development infrastructure, contributors have been doing a lot of the work of maintaining the build cluster, and when they aren't available, it is often off-line for days at a time. In addition, there has been conflict with some of these contributors, so they are now resentful of being the only support for the build cluster.
• Animosity by the RPM5 protagonists
• Lack of effort in supporting the traditional (non-Live-rsync-all-files-to-disk) installer, which is critical in any server-focused environment. Apparently it still works, but if there are bugs they probably won't be addressed.

These issues seem to not be affecting Mageia much, so now that 2011 is out, and I will be forced to decide between Mandriva and Mageia for my own uses, I will probably be upgrading all my Mandriva 2010.1 machines to Magiea, and will probably move all my effort to Mageia and orphan my Mandriva packages (like many other contributors have done). The current focus of Mandriva is not sufficient for my own uses, so I believe my contributions will be of more value to myself in Mageia than Mandriva.

Note to all users considering Mandriva 2011, note that while an upgrade to Mandriva 2011 should be relatively painless, a later crossgrade to Mageia will not be (due to the RPM5 switch in Mandriva 2011), while a cross-grade from Mandriva 2010.1 to Mageia should also be as painless as upgrading to Mandriva 2011. So, while I won't tell you to ditch Mandriva, you should pause at this stage to decide if you are currently on Mandriva 2010.x.