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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?
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
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.