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Mandriva Not Shuttering Its Doors, Yet

Posted by Unknown on from the making-gnu-easy-since-before-it-was-cool dept.

An anonymous reader writes, quoting OS News: "In his usual man-of-a-few-words manner today, Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, announced that enough funds have been secured to allow Mandriva to keep its doors open and continue development." From the announcement: "The strategy review started two weeks ago will now actively be finalized and the corresponding decisions taken mid of May."

1 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is Mandriva? by Urza9814 · · Score: 4, Informative

    1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?

    I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.

    4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.

    There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get.

    It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there. Best hardware autodetection and autoconfig I have ever seen in a Linux distro. Back a couple years ago when getting a broadcom wifi package to work on Ubuntu required downloading ndiswrapper, installing it from source, and configuring all that in the terminal -- the same hardware worked on Mandriva right out of the box. I had a friend recently with some weird graphics card glitch that meant Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo -- nothing she tried could start X, and googling the error messages came up with forum posts that essentially said 'it's a bug in this hardware version -- good luck, you're on your own.' Mandriva? Worked flawlessly.

    Maybe they're advertising it wrong. They should probably be focusing on things like this. But personally, I've been using Linux for around eight years now, and from day one the distro I recommend for newbies is Mandriva (well, on day one it was Mandrake....) I still haven't found another distro -- hell, I haven't found any other OS -- that's as easy as Mandriva to get started with.