Slashdot Mirror
Mandriva Goes Out of Business
An anonymous reader writes: After struggling for the past several years, Mandriva has finally gone out of business, and is in the process of being liquidated. The company was responsible for Mandriva Linux, itself a combination of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva Linux. When Mandriva fell upon hard times, many of the distro's developers migrated to Mageia Linux, which is still going strong and just putting the final touches on its next major version (5).
I made the move to Mageia years ago and never looked back. Still happy. Since it is not a business, it should theoretically not go under. Retains all the spirit and functionality of Mandrake/Mandriva but is completely community driven. It is a great desktop distro.
>"Strong? That's an understatement considering we're looking at +-1000 hits per day on average... compared to the 10s of thousand hits for Ubuntu"
Really? Because that is not what distrowatch shows. For last 6 months it has it listed as the 8th most watched distro and with 970 hits per day compared to Ubuntu's 1738 hits per day which is not even double.
In the last 12 months, Mageia is ranked 6th. And for the previous 12 months, Mageia was ranked 4th, with hits approaching Ubuntu. Mageia has longer release cycles, so when Mageia 5 hits, watch the current rank start to climb again.
Not that distrowatch is some type of scientific survey or anything, but it is something other than just wild rantings of an "anonymous coward".
Actually he is absolutely right! You are the one who is wrong. For manufacturers it would be cheaper to use Linux and if the users didnt care about which OS was on it they would sell for the same price and make more profit by using Linux! But because, as he correctly points out, the primary concern is the OS that will "allow the average user to run the most applications" the more expensive option is chosen. We have seen plenty of major manufacturers offer Linux pre-installed on desktops, the days of OS exclusivity with OEMs were gone long ago. These systems were even for sale at places like BestBuy and nobody wanted them because they didnt run their programs.
Companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc would save billions of dollars every year in license fees if the users didnt care whether the OS was Windows or Linux.