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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).
Face it, if Windows were a politician he'd be re-elected with a 90% majority every time, because Windows can deliver on his promises while Linux can't.
It's only really Linux desktop that does poorly. Embedded, mobile and server are fantastic. Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you need?! ALSA, PulseAudio, FFADO, Jack, OSS, etc...) and all kinds of different UI paradigms, frameworks and toolkits. There's no consistency because it is all about choice. The problem with that is that the vast majority of computer uses do not want to choose every different option for every different part of the operating system so choosing a distro is a complete headfuck and hoping for consistent look and feel across applications is even worse. Great for (some) developers and admins, crap for the vast majority of other people (and the virtually immeasurable percentage that your anecdotal evidence -- yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).
Linux itself is brilliant, it is just that thus far nobody has done a decent job at wrapping it in a desktop distribution palatable to the majority.
Nothing is over.
The distro is the same, present in the daughters OpenMandriva, in Mageia and in ROSA/POCA. The distro is not over, though the forks are just starting to diverge.
The developers are still there, the users are still there -- and above all, Linux is still there. It's not even like when XP reached its EOL. One just has to pick a distro and go on.
The developers are great people. If you try so hard to make it happen, that can only mean you have a strong heart and courage to face the odds. What they lack was Marketing skills. Other Linux distros, if they're smart, are probably contacting these guys because Mandriva had an excellence which I witnessed several times these last years. Or hardware makers, if they need e.g. embedded Linux for, say, a phone... *wink*.
Because the Mandriva guys were thoughtful, the user community has already another place to go, OpenMandriva. BTW, thank you, fellas, you did think about us even in your darkest hour. Not so many are that nice in this world we live now. More than once you saved me. Thanks for being awesome!
Some even opted for Mageia long ago (like me). And ROSA looks another good option. For those who want traditional desktops, there's also other similar distributions, though for hardware support and configuration probably just a few can rival Mandriva.
Actually, there was some wise juggling behind the stages and we now face the demise of just the part of the company which was supposed to offer enterprise services and products. With players like Red Hat, SuSE and Oracle, I think this is a somewhat hard to enter fight. Any other competitor would face difficult odds in that arena.
It's not the end, too, because I bet these people will still offer professional services, either personally or they might join others coming from Mandriva, or from one of the daughters, or still being hired but already existing service providers.
I was much more worried the first time they sank :-) I hope they get reunited in the future, after they perfect their ninja skills to fight again and I hope next time they pay more attention to Marketing -- if nothing more to devise a minimally acceptable name -- even Mageia and OpenMandriva names suck majorly and ROSA, well, ROSA is OK but the logo is blue when it should be rosy! Ever imagined Red Hat's logo in green?
At last, it's not the end, because... it ain't over till the fat lady sings! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_ain%27t_over_till_the_fat_lady_sings