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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).
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!
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.
They changed the name because of the threat of litigation, and they couldn't afford the proper set of lawyers to tell the plaintiff to f*** off, but they should've changed their name to something that ended in "drake", e.g. "Sandrake." They did have an opportunity when Red Hat abandoned their consumer distro and their shrink wrap product (the two were actually the same) - Mandrake should've stepped in and taken charge. This is when you need a guy who has some marketing savvy (not talking about a business school guy, but someone who knows how to grab press like Michael Robertson for example). They should've said "we have a solution to the problem with non-free drivers" or something like that, even if it turned out to be a hack.
>"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".
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.