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Mandriva Not Shuttering Its Doors, Yet
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."
I remember back when it was called Mandrake, it was the best easy Linux distro out there. The one big plus it had was the installation process, where the auto-formatter tool decided the space for the /, /home and swap mountpoints. For anybody switching from a Windows only background this was a big plus.
Plus it had drakconf, a control panel UI, and tons of neat looking applications. While its best times remain in the past, it still is a great distro (or atleast was in 2010) and deserves a look.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
Well, you could also say that excessive diversity is one of the major problems why desktop Linux is not as mighty as it could be.
While it's good to read that Mandriva has continued, I forked off to Mageia which is currently on version 2 beta3 testing, seems to perform better than version 1, but the only down side is some packages that are in Mandriva are still not in Mageia. But for most people - that is the normal home user, it should be fine if they decide to install Mageia.
Don't forget, it was the workforce that Mandriva fired in the first place that led to the Mageia fork, and a drain on programming talent that Mandriva needed.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I still fail to understand that argument. If we can not trust computer users to choose a distribution based on a short description on the "About" section or Wikipedia (or go with the obvious choices), how can we trust those people to elect leaders for whole nations?
So your "fix" was to make the sentence grammatically incorrect and incoherent? What does "besides of" mean?
Oy.
The differences between distributions are sooo subtle that it doesn't make much difference. And some of the difference are completely irrelevant - I can't even remember them.
Just like with politicians, then!
What is Mandriva? Yes I know all about the history, Mandrake and Connectiva, blah blah.
I'm talking about the technical marketing message. Why use it instead of a zillion other RPM distros or a zillion other OS where KDE can be installed?
The wikipedia page lists:
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
2) Its a boot loader for KDE, essentially. Well, what makes this different than every other KDE OS?
3) It has some themes. Find me an OS without this? I should spend hours wiping and recreating my system because I like this tone of blue?
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
5) Live USBs basically the same as live cdroms are available. Find me a non-commercial OS without this?
The mandriva website lists:
1) Its a "next generation experience" but its actually just KDE (find me a modern OS where you can't install KDE with something like "apt-get install kde")
2) Its "better and simpler" but the details listed describe how that means the icons are bigger. Eh.
3) It has a smart desktop, which is apparently defined as it has some KDE apps, as I would have suspected from #1.
4) It ships with firefox 5.0.1 (thats awesome, says VLM who is reading this page on a FF 12.0 browser)
5) Libreoffice is available (find me a modern OS where libreoffice is not available?)
Amazingly it doesn't list any OS features at all, only lists features of the apps that every other distro also has. Mandriva is not FF 5.0.1, its an OS that happens to run FF. Being able to install libreoffice is not a OS feature, any more than its a feature for every other OS that libreoffice can be installed upon (and I never use libreoffice anymore anyway, all GOOG docs aka GOOG drive for me...). I do NOT need to install Mandriva in order to experience FF, or libreoffice, or kde (awesome user both work and home, just gave up on KDE around the "bundle with mysql" era made it a bit heavy for something that does almost nothing for me but run a terminal session with ssh and FF).
So, what, if anything, are they doing to lure me over? What makes mandriva special or stand out from being yet another distro that happens to be yet another RPM distro, and yet another KDE distro? The lack of any answer Might be central to their lack of success.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I mean, outside of fedora, Ubuntu, Xubuntu (maybe Mint) and Slackware, what's the point?
How about, "I want something like Fedora, but which does not require a yearly upgrade that will inevitably break things?" Now, where might I find such a disto, without having to pay for it...
http://www.centos.org/
(In reality, I use ScientificLinux, but both basically follow RHEL)
Distros are not forked just for fun. Sometimes there are real disagreements over how packages should be managed, what new features are important, what patches are worth applying, etc. I do not need the latest eye candy and I do not really have the time for things to mysteriously break, but other people want the latest eye candy and are willing to fix broken things.
Hundreds of distros may seem excessive, but a lot of those are just small communities of people with similar enough aims.
Palm trees and 8
If there were just 5 or 10 choices, the choice argument could be valid. When you have 100 choices, which in turn could be multiplied by a factor of 3 to represent the various DEs that they're bundled w/, that's what starts the confusion.
Also, even if one takes just the #kernels out there, multiplies that by the #libraries in use by various software, and then multiple variations of everything else, the number snowballs to a point that makes it impossible to manage.
There are a few things wrong with that statement. One, it doesn't matter to me how popular Linux is, as long as they keep developing it. Why is lack of popularity a problem? It's not like Linux is a money-making enterprise. As long as my computer works I don't care how many others are using the same OS. Two, Linux isn't popular for quite a few reasons, foremost that every non-Apple PC comes with Windows preinstalled. Few have ever even heard of Linux, let alone know how superior to Windows it is. Hell, slashdot comments show you that a whole lot of folks here haven't ever tried it or they'd realize how crappy Windows really is (Windows is improving, but is still nowhere near Linux in useability, customability, and features).
And its diversity of distros is one of many reasons it's hard to write Linux malware (that, and repositories of course... not to mention MS's inherent flaws that make virus writing easy for that platform).
Personally, the more distros there are, the more I like Linux. If all there were was Gnome-Ubuntu and Red Hat, I'd probably be using Windows.
Free Martian Whores!
ScientificLinux is the new CentOS. Faster updates, and automatically applied security updates by default. A couple of times, I have received the e-mail from my SL servers about security updates having been applied before the e-mail from RedHat announcing the same security update for my RHEL systems.
Backed by CERN, Fermilab and others, SL is unlikely to go away any time soon.
What's the point of running something "like Fedora" if you don't buy support?
BTW, do you know if Scientific Linux has current packages for R? I have to run RHEL on my bioinformatics machine because IT here is braindead. RHEL doesn't package R, so I've been stuck building my own. I figure SL packages would work for me, but I haven't been able to find them.
In any case, if I wasn't required to have paid support I'd go straight to Debian, not Scientific Linux. Why? Because the software I use is packaged and ready to go, and I can easily check that on their website.
Why would anyone choose Scientific Linux if you can't easily check what versions of what packages are available? And if the R project(one of the most popular scientific pakages) is unavailable, that's a really good reason not to use Scientific Linux.
I personally can't imagine why anyone would ever choose to use anything but Debian under any circumstances whatsoever.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Do you evaluate every car on the market before you buy one? What about every phone?
Linux is no different. You might compare the ones you've heard of - but even for me (I've been using linux as my sole desktop since the late 90's) that's only about 5-10.
Most users have only heard of 1-3 different distros, and I'm pretty sure that its not that difficult to figure out which is best. Each one only takes 30 mins or so to install, so at most it would take only a few days to evaluate all 3. Most can run off a cd nowadays, so there really is no barrier to trying them out to find out which is best for you.
Linux just has a stigma, and so people will keep repeating this stuff forever regardless of whether it is true.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.