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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).
Mandriva still sounds like a gay porno.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Back in 2002-2004 they were a great distribution; based on Red Hat, but using the optimizations for the 586/686 chipsets they made for a solid platform for LAMP powered systems running on last generation hardware. The support was top-notch for subscribers and when I started pushing out BEOWULF type systems for our computational systems they were right there making it flow.
Farewell Mandrake/Mandriva...
He who is always at the bottom of the distribution list, but needs the information first!
My first experience with Linux was Mandrake back in 2003, when I was 16. I had to ask a mate to download the CD images for me because his street had ADSL and I was still on dial-up lol. Fun summer :)
In 1999, Mandrake was the first distro I ever got installed and running 100%. I've long since abandoned it, but it's a happy memory.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
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.
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.
>"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".
>"First time I ever hear of Mageia. It seems like a minor project in comparison to Mandriva..."
Not really. Most of the Mandriva user base, volunteer base, and contributors moved over to Mageia already, which accelerated the death of Mandriva. And I expect even more now.
I believe it has all the same number of packages and features of Mandriva, just completely community driven instead of by a [small] corporation. It is almost 4 years old now. The now defunct Mandriva even started using the Mageia distribution as a technical platform for their Business Server product in 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
I don't think that say Ubuntu is particularly more of a headfuck than Windows 8... Windows try really hard to hide some pretty fundamental facts from the user,
just to look simpler to use, with the result that it's *harder* to use the system since a lot of behavior is just inexplicable without the underlying metaphors.
Like the file system in windows for instance. Where are my files? Is the file system root the desktop? Or My Documents, or C:/ or my network drive?
(The driver support on Linux is a bit crappier though, since very few vendors spend time or money on linux drivers for their consumer-class stuff, especially l
Don't be ridiculous. Majority will be using whatever OS that is pre-installed on the pc. Majority of users won't spot much of a difference between windows, linux and mac nowadays. Differences between them are insignificant for you unless you're a nerd.
Linux driver support definitely is a bit crappier, but it's a lot better than it was even say 5 years ago. Linux's biggest problem on the desktop is the lack of application support, the basics are there and there are a lot of admin/dev/poweruser tools but for workstation users it's pretty slim pickings. Most of the mainstream vendors don't provide Linux support for their biggest offerings - which are more often than not the industry standard - and that is the real issue.
Even if you don't have UI consistency that doesn't really matter once you have opened your programs because you aren't really futzing around in the OS much, you're working in the programs that you need to run. So in that regard from a UI perspective pretty much any Linux distro should be fine and even the Windows 7 to 8 switch isn't really a big deal, your programs still look the same. Linux vendors need to forget fiddling with the UI and all the OS shit that doesn't matter and focus on getting support from major vendors so the OS can do what an operating system's primary purpose is: Run the programs the user wants to run.
Shouldn't someone from the anti-open-source bunch be on here stating that this "proves" that open source isn't viable?
Oops, shouldn't give them ideas.
I more lament the demise of Crunchbang, actually. It was a pretty original concept. But distros come and go. There are market forces in open source, too. Commercial software also comes and goes, but when it goes, users are generally left with ... not much.
You might be interested in Crunchbang++. They are basically a continuation of the original, with the same goals and values. I've been mainly a FreeBSD user since early 2005 or so, and that's my main OS for my workstation. However, when it came to my laptop, nothing could beat Crunchbang on that thing - hope the successor can be as awesome as the original.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
No. For manufacturers only matter their anti-competitive deals with IBM, Microsoft and what-not. Also, there's no difference between OSes for majority of users so no reason to change..
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
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.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them. I never have to do anything much with that computer, besides regular backups of course. Back when she was running Windows, I had no end of problems with it. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to similar stories, of switching their spouses or parents to Linux and no longer needing to spend any time being their unpaid tech support.
What desktop Linux is, is a very good product for people who don't need to run any Windows (or OSX) applications. For home users who just surf the web, use Facebook, and do basic PC tasks like some basic word processing or whatever, Linux works extremely well. For people who just *have* to run Photoshop or whatever, obviously that's a problem, but not everyone is like that.
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.
You're completely overblowing things. Most modern Linux distros have settled on ALSA and PulseAudio (ALSA is the kernel-level drivers; PulseAudio is a userspace layer on top of that) and it works fine. No one uses OSS on Linux any more, and Jack is only used by a small number of people doing high-performance audio stuff. Different UIs aren't a big problem; people get along just fine choosing a desktop environment like KDE or Cinnamon and sticking with that. Different toolkits don't matter if you aren't developing software; you can run software written in one just fine in a DE written in another.
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
And they don't need to. Just download a copy of Ubuntu or Mint and be done with it. That's what everyone else does. This choice is generally made by the person who's computer-savvy, and the user doesn't question it. My wife uses KDE because I chose that for her since I prefer it and it works similarly to Windows, and she's never had a problem with it. She doesn't know or ask about Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, Xcfe, etc. People have zillions of choices when they buy a car too, but regular, everyday people don't have a problem there. They pick something they like and stop worrying about it. It may be a car their friend had, or they may have just stopped at a dealership and checked out a few things based on a salesman's advice. No one checks out every single model of car before making a decision.
yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).
No, actually it doesn't (BTW, your sentence doesn't parse here). Most home users don't do anything terribly complicated with their computers, and these days they really don't do anything besides use it for web-surfing. This is why tablets have become so popular: people are sick of Windows problems, and tablets work just fine for using Facebook. Linux works fine here too, and better than tablets (since you get a real monitor, a real keyboard, real storage space, etc.). For the things most home users do, Linux does them extremely well. It can even play a lot of games now too, though that still works better on Windows because many games still don't support Linux (including anything that isn't on Steam) of course. No, it doesn't do TurboTax, but who cares: everyone's moving to web-based stuff for that. No, it doesn't run Pro/E, but how many home users do that. I've never heard of someone's grandma running engineering software. No, it doesn't run [random Windows software], but neither does Mac OSX, but I never hear of anyone saying Macbooks aren't viable alternatives.
You are wrong. OEMs charge money to preinstall software (trial-ware, most of it). They can do that on Windows, but not on Linux. Thus, it actually ends up costing more (in terms of opportunity costs) to install Linux over Windows.
Windows has always been easier to use with multiple drives or partitions or CD/DVD drives. /media/username/f907c92b-cc37-4207-aab7-90a526d154f2 (I shit you not), semi-auto mounted.
You just go to D:\, E:\, F:\ etc. instead of doing a mkdir as root and editing the fstab, or living with poor defaults like
You can also go to Disk Management to assign drive letters, "deassign" them for partitions you don't want to see mounted and as far as the user is concerned : there's one file system root per file system.
Why isn't that simpler? linux is better is you want to do some shit like mounting a specific subdirectory (/usr/blah etc.) from a network share and Windows is rather more inflexible, but doesn't require expert knowledge to access data.
I also have that GUI component that pops to warn the system disk is almost full (that can be useful!). It offers to help me, and that launches a piece of software that does a recursive search to show me where space is wasted but as this is the / drive it searches all file systems, which is slow and useless.