I keep reading review after review after review of the current crop of linux distributions. And everytime I’m annoyed at the end. I’m not annoyed by the style, or the comments, but more at the way they always end far too soon? One of the latest reviews of Lycoris is a prime example. What is this a review of? It’s a review of the installation, and a quick insight into some of the packages found. To compare, it’s like reviewing the opening cinematic sequence of game. You need to review the way the game plays as well! And people need to start reviewing how the distributions function over a period of time greater than a day or two. So here’s my Mandrake 8.x experience.
Getting up and running
First, my machine; a GeForce2, Celeron 700, SoundBlaster 64, a nice 19″ monitor, hardware modem, nothing fancy, everything linux-compatible. Then there’s me. I’m nobody special (yet!) in the world of computing, just somebody who finally had enough of Windows and enough interest in Linux to make the switch on his own.
I downloaded Mandrake 8.1 in eager anticipation. I had gotten rid of my horrible Microsoft infestation once and for all, and Mandrake was being hailed (by all these reviews) as one of the leading distributions in terms of ease of use.
So, I threw in my 8.1 CD, and the installation went well, quickly and smoothly. There were some bugs, a few of the back buttons just didn’t work right, but nothing that stopped me. It certainly wasn’t an installation that was for computer illiterates, with a number of slightly technical questions. But other than that it was fine.
On a side note, I installed Lilo first time around, then reinstalled Mandrake and selecting GRUB. (Because I wanted to!) This was fine, but when I tried to install a 3rd time, it wouldn’t let me install GRUB, throwing up a spurious error about a problem with my master boot sector. But Lilo was fine. Weird, but unimportant.
Anyway, enough of the installation. You can read about that in, well, every review I’ve ever read about a linux distribution. And you can read how ‘yes you can import .docs’ in all those two, I’m not going to touch on this since I had no .docs to import urgently anyway.
Loading up Lilo, the options are, well, plain wrong. It recognised my NTFS drive as a bootable windows partition even thought all I did was back up files onto it ie no Windows there. (I tried to boot it out of morbid curiousity and the error message was just boring.) Lilo had options like “Mandrake non-FB” which, well, mean nothing to me. KISS; names should be explicit. Obviously acronyms like FB are explicit if you know what they mean. But I, along with 99.95% of the worlds population, do not.
So I just go with the flow and it booted up fine, I logged in via KDM as the normal user account I’d set up. And the first time user dialogues sprung up. I set up my modem, my freeserve account, happy as pie was I. I fancied Gnome as my desktop. I didn’t set up any email, since I’m currently just on hotmail at the moment for my out-of-work time email. (Besides, does your Joe Average understand POP3? Probably not.) And my nice Mandrake desktop was displayed. Okay, that’s pretty good, I was getting excited about my brand spanking new linux distribution.
It took a while to boot, but that didn’t bother me. Windows was hardly lightening quick, but as long as it’s less than a minute I couldn’t really care too much. Besides, I don’t think Joe Average cares too much. He, like I, just hits the power button then saunters off to make a cup of tea or do something a little less mentionable.
The Internet
First things first, the modem. After a bit of messing around in the menus, I found out where I wanted to go. [ Networking -> Remote Access ] is hardly the most intuitive place to stick your modem dialers, even though it does makes sense once you find it. But explain that to Joe Average, my mum would never have found that. Anyway, I was in Gnome and I wanted to see the status of my connection, so I tried the Gnome applet dialler. But there was no account there like I’d just set up seconds ago? So I set up my freeserve account again. And I ran it, and the applet was broken; text was not being cleared but covered instead, so the applet quickly became a mess. (Why include broken software like that?)
Scrap that, I tried KPPP. I had to set up my freeserve connection again. This worked, but there was no display, and I wanted one that badly that I quit out of Gnome and logged into KDE. But I’d forgotten to disconnect, KPPP was hidden, it wouldn’t let me load a second instance of it, and I didn’t know how I could get hold of the current KPPP GUI. Fortunately, I’m not totally ignorant so I popped up a console and killed the offending process. (But Joe Average would probably have had to reboot.)
So, KPPP was now running with a display. Brilliant. First things first, let’s try browsing. Galeon had gotten rave reviews so I loaded it up, 1.0.3. It was good, I was happy. Instant messaging; my research indicated I should try Gaim first. It was relatively intuitive, and I was quickly chatting away and, zip, it died after a few lines of text in a conversation. And repeatedly. So, scrap that. I tried Licq for my ICQ needs. It was ugly, and it didn’t allow me to download my ICQ contact list as ICQ has for, say, the past year. So I tried everybuddy 0.2.7 which I had to download, but had MSN for me too. It worked, but was very basic. But not as ugly as Licq. But it crashed too. So I moved on to Gabber, which was stable although not very friendly. But it had to do.
By this time it’s worth mentioning that Galeon had crashed on me 3 or 4 times in the hour I’d been trying these various IM clients. So I quit Galeon and went into Mozilla. I forget which version but, although slower, was somewhat more stable.
XChat worked well for irc, and was suprisingly user friendly.
Going Downhill
That was about as good as my 8.1 experience got.
First I started looking through the packages. Mandrake, by default, installs too much. The package manager groups packages horribly into broad categories that generally overlap. There’s little or no distinction made between ‘console only’ and ‘gui’ packages – Joe Average obviously doesn’t want the former – and the list of packages is frequently populated by various language packs.
Grouping by interface, product would have been so much simpler. And categories just shouldn’t overlap. Another one for complete and utter unintuitiveness.
KDE mystifies me. Why is it so popular? Whoever made Klipboard should be shot, I hate it when programs grab hold of the interface when you’re trying to work which is another annoying feature that I can’t believe makes it into ‘hacker’ software. You’re typing in a window when ‘boosh’ another pops up and you haven’t been watching. (Some people have to look at the keyboard to type – although I was looking out the window.) You’ve just typed half a paragraph into the wrong window! Then copying and pasting is a nightmare, especially with Klipboard which was the first thing to get disabled.
Anyway, perusing the KDE menu just isn’t fun. There’s lots of badly named, unexplained programs. Again, it’s just messy. The great thing about the windows start menu is that all your major programs are listed under ‘programs’. Whilst I agree there’s a lot of programs for linux, there has to be a better to organise them than the current way. It’s just, again, unintuitive.
I noticed that Gabber had been significantly updated, so I downloaded the latest RPM. I tried to install it, but it wouldn’t let me, a number of source dependencies. This didn’t make sense since I was installing the binary but, if it won’t let me, it won’t let me. So I gave up the ghost and, since most of the programs were quite out-of-date, I loaded up the package manager.
My research indicated I should add a cooker server as a package source for the mandrake package manager. Oh, and since I didn’t have the 3rd CD I deleted that from the package sources first. So I go to add a cooker server – it doesn’t provide a list to select from. I got a server off the website, and hit ‘add’ and… a little bar moving side to side with ‘adding server’ pops up. There’s no indication of how long it will take? After 10 minutes of waiting I killed it, and ran the mandrake package manager from a console. (Again, Joe Average wouldn’t.) In the conole it gives an output indicated how many kilobytes have been downloaded of the cooker server rpm index. So at least I could see it was doing something. A movie and a cup of tea later I come up to see it’s been completed.
So I search for some programs. I forget which, but they weren’t there? But they were before. A quick discussion on irc in the #mandrake channel identifies they were on the 3rd CD. And removing that CD as a source meant for some reason that mandrake package manager also ignored all those packages from the cooker server. Brilliant, another home run for stupid unintuitive behaviour.
It presented me with the ridiculously badly organised list of packages again, but fortunately there is a ‘search’ function and I knew what I wanted. Anyway, I selected the packages and it started downloading overnight. It seemed to work fine, and I installed the latest version of Mozilla.
But now Mozilla wouldn’t display .png files? Brilliant. Perhaps that was Mozilla, but I was in no mood to submit a bug report so I left it for now and moved onto Konqueror.
After a few weeks of awkward use, I reinstalled and went through half the hassle again. I was again forced to install Lilo. Learning from my ‘mistakes’ things were slightly less frustrating. Anyway, time to update my packages, so I go to the mandrake package manager. But now when I try to add a cooker server it fails every time, and only at the end – after an hour or so waiting for it.
By now I’d gotten bored of my inability to update unless I resolved package dependencies myself. And 8.2 had come out, so I downloaded that. Surely it can only be better.
8.2, 0.1 better than 8.1
The 8.2 install was a bit prettier, and a bit less buggy, but generally the same. Still the same options of either installing a load of crap you don’t want or filtering through a badly organised package tree. I went with Lilo, because it’s the default and it is prettier than GRUB. Besides, the bootloader makes very little difference to the system.
An annoyance was that I didn’t want to ‘upgrade’ but rather have a clean install. But it wouldn’t let me keep my /home directory – the installer just threw errors at me when I tried to do that. So I had to lose everything I’d done in the last month. (Good job it was nothing.)
A few of the packages had been updated. But not much. Why they released 8.2 when they did is beyond me. Gnome 2 is almost out, KDE 3 had just been released, Mozilla 1 and Open Office one were also around the corner. Go figure, still, back to Gnome 1.4, KDE 2.2.2 and Mozilla 0.9.8. A few months may also have given them time to get most of the Mandrake features bug free. But that’s politics. Release early and often, fix later. Whilst this works with open source software, Mandrake is a distribution, not software. It should Just Work ™.
Galeon was still at 1.0.3 – mystifying given how long it’d been in the 1.2.x stage prior to the Mandrake 8.2 release. Before and after upgrading Galeon it crashed regularly. So I upgraded Mozilla to 1.0RC1, which worked well. (I have to say I am in love with Mozilla.)
But all the same problems are still there. The package manager is still horribly unintuitive.
Then, after a mere week in which I had rebooted only once and properly, on the second reboot my desktop icons have no disappeared. Since I think desktop icons are stupid (you have to minimise your applications to access them) it didn’t bother me that much until I had to kill an application for the first time.
Mandrake nicely puts a kill icon on your desktop. But it doesn’t put it anywhere else. Oh, and don’t kill your taskbar, you can’t retrieve it either without rebooting. That might sound stupid but ignorant users do seemingly stupid things. Power in the hands of ignorance usually ends in destruction. I wanted to kill something, so I popped up Konqueror and found my desktop icons through it (remember, they’re no longer on my desktop) and got my kill mouse cursor and… suddenly, the application I want to kill is behind Konqueror. How do I lose my kill cursor… wait… brainstorm, I may be able to kill it by killing the task in the taskbar. But, that just killed the taskbar, not the application.
Anyway, I wanted to do some more updates, so up comes the mandrake package manager. But the updates fail! The packages it grabs from the cooker turn out to be ‘corrupt’ and… wait a minute… all the cooker packages are now corrupt.
I’m back to manual downloading and dependency fixing. Brilliant.
Easy Installation (disclaimer: not everything is easy to install.)
Browsing through the available games was an eye opener as well. Hardware acceleration isn’t set up by default, so any 3d games won’t be running well. Since I have a mainstream card, an NVidia GeForce 2, I don’t accept that this shouldn’t be done automatically by something that claims to have an ‘easy install’.
The number of frequently crashing programs was pretty disgusting. I’m not asking for 100% stability but a program that works for more than 5 minutes without disappearing isn’t much to ask. I mean, I know these distributions want to be cutting edge but that’s just taking the preverbial biscuit. Then, quite astonishingly, half the packages are just out of date anyway? (Galeon being a prime example.)
I just downloaded Red Hat. It might not be for Newbies and have a wizard install, but I bet it Just Works ™. I bet it doesn’t come with badly broken software. And the install won’t give me the impression I have a fully functioning system so at least I’ll know where I stand.
Windows mostly does what it says, even if it doesn’t say what it does. Programs are named normally, and programs behave consistently. Oh, and it’s so easy to install programs.
Operating systems shouldn’t just be easy to install. An installation should only happen once anyway! It’s the other 99.99% of the time you use your computer that counts! Most linux distributions just aren’t close to being a for-Joe-Average operating system. It might be fine at work where your IT admin people (politcally correct, eh?) sort out everything for you, but at home? Ease-Of-Use != Ease-Of-Installation!!! And when will reviews reflect this?
About the Author:
Charles Goodwin is a 22 year old from the UK, an IT Manager (and hopeful developer), fresh out of University (Computer Science), with a (gorgeous) baby boy (2). He’s been using PCs since the times of DOS and after that, from Windows 95 thru to Windows 2000. He is living… at home with his mum in a rural area where broadband is unavailable. (Hence the modem fuss.) Outta the office he is kickboxing thrice weekly and soccer whenever his friends are up for a game, and curiously, he’s got a Canadian girlfriend who he met over ICQ. Contact Charles at [email protected]
Funny, I was just recently complaining about the same thing — that most reviews concentrated on the installation and little else.
I have used Mandrake for quite a while now, and used 8.1 up until recently. IME 8.2 was a letdown. They promised that 8.2 would be mostly polish, that the improvements would be in the details. In reality 8.1 is far more polished than 8.2!
Galeon is my main browser. It rarely quits on me. Go figure. Personally I don’t mind getting to choose between several different ways to skin a cat. If it doesn’t work with Galeon, I try Opera. If Opera barfs it up, I try Konqueror etc.
This was very similar to my experience when I installed Mandrake 8.0 a few months ago. I actually had to reinstall it twice because I managed to somehow mess up the system to the point that KDE stopped working completely.
My solution now is to run Windows 2000 for my main PC and have a seperate Linux box on the network that I can SSH in. This way I get the best of both worlds.
I have to say that I really love Linux. I just hate Linux GUI apps (both Qt and GTK+). Even at my university where we all work on Sun Blades that have been configured very well there are some apps that constantly crash and the clipboard doesn’t work very well (we use Gnome at school).
This is by far the best review of a Linux distro I have read here. I have complained many times here that Linux reviews always focus mainly on the installation; if not entirely.
I also agree with the review of Mandrake 8.2. I have yet to install a copy of Mandrake that didn’t frustrate me and make me wish I hadn’t bothered.
Paul, I just did the opposite.
I am enjoying a linux desktop for the first time in years.
As I am using Java for a year and a half, I can use whichever desktop that suits me best, and my current linux machine with Gentoo + Gnome 2 is excellent and fills my heart with joy!
I will not switch back to win 98, 2000 or XP.
I’m between workhorse computers right now since I sold mine and am waiting for MacWorld NYC 2002. So, for now I got one of our old P-200MMX systems from work (HD wiped clean). I used Mandrake 8.1 a few months ago and loved it so I expected 8.2 to be even better. I decided to do the “minimal installation” of 8.2 on this old computer. The installation worked like a dream except at the end when I had to re-insert CD No. 1 – it kept spitting it out and re-asking for it! Somehow I got 8.2 working, but it wouldn’t let the “regular” user account I created log-in, only root. Fsck this, I said.
Feeling frustrated, I grabbed my Mandrake 8.1 CDs (retail version, no less!), reformatted the HD and made a smallish installation with Windomaker and Mozilla. Works like a charm, just like it did on my workhorse system a few months back.
quote:
“I just downloaded Red Hat. It might not be for Newbies and have a wizard install, but I bet it Just Works ™. I bet it doesn’t come with badly broken software. And the install won’t give me the impression I have a fully functioning system so at least I’ll know where I stand”
You’re in for a disappointment.
I just recently upgraded from 7.2, which was working so well for me I was reluctant to screw it up by upgrading. Good call; the upgrade was such an ugly mess I wound up doing a clean install. Wrong versions of libraries remained, and the upgrade process vanished all the apps I had in /usr/local. Fortunatly, I had backed up my /home directory, which was where I kept my irreplacable stuff. I’m running on a Thinkpad, and I had good fun getting my DSL connection going. Actually, I do have it going, but Net Monitor reports it as a failed connection, and I wound up having to configure pppoe manually. So much for Net Monitor. But as long as I ignore it, DSL is working fine. Another annoying thing, for some reason when I open Konsole, it doesn’t execute my .bash_profile so I wind up having to set my PATH variable on the command line, which is a bit of a PITA. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to get Konsole to honor my bash profile in the not too distant future. Also, for some reason when I boot, the microphone input is activated and the machine emits a loud, annoying feedback until KDE starts and the mixer settings override whatever is turning on the mike. I’ve already disabled ALSA and sound in the startup scripts, so I’m still trying to figure out what the hell is turning on the sound. All in all this really isn’t a bad disro, but it does seem to be rather sloppily put together in comparison to 7.2. I’m hoping the software updates eventually smooth out some of the rough edges.
I’ve been using Linux for a few years now, and I’ve probably tried almost every distribution out there. My suggestion is to flip-flop between the mainstream distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse), so that you have a rough idea of how a Linux system works, then try Debian. You’ll never want to go back. Ease of upgrade, stability, number of packages; it’s got it all. My only complaint is the lack of extremely up to date packages (no KDE3 yet in unstable although there are experimental debs that I’m using without problems), but that is the price you pay for stability.
It didn’t detect my modem, my beautiful graphics card (which didn’t matter, I would have to download drivers from NVidia) and detected my monitor as a Generic SVGA monitor, can you believe that? My installation of XP was okay, except the first time I install it, when the OS finish booting, it only shows a black screen with an unmoveable mouse. I rebooting, happen again. Didn’t feel like troubleshoting with Microsoft Malaysia “friendly” staff, i reinstall, everything was perfect…. Pershap the best installation I had was Mdk 7.1 on a old machine, everything detected prefectly, and I boot it up in an hour. Unfortunately, 120mhz Pentium MX with 32mb of EDO RAM is terribly slow for web surfing. And making it the home server is a crime, abuse (you could see how it chokes…).
Magno, my problem is that I’m still running a PIII450 which is too slow to comfortably run any Swing-based Java apps on.
I also discovered cygwin a few weeks ago which gives me a fully functional bash shell and GNU utilities right from windows. This has made Windows a pretty decent O/S.
Its not often i read reviews of distributions like SuSE, RedHat and Mandrake, because usually i dont like them (the reviews moreso than the distros). I liked this review though, it seemed very truthful and unbiased.
Just reading about dependency hell got me all frustrated, i feel great pain for all those that have to manually satisfy dependencies.
A distro may present you with “instant gooey and pretty icons” but that really doesnt help the average joe user now does it? Make the basics work, such as easy application installation (god bless apt). Thats why i think that with a little help, a pretty average user could use Debian.
Charles, you have hit the nail on the head with recent reviews and Mandrake. I try lots of distros and have been trying them for years. I like most but none have been such a let down as Mandrake. I think that it is the farthest thing from an easy to use distro as there ever has been. I spent two weeks trying to get it to work for my g/f and I finally gave up – and she hated it by then too. She used to use Red Hat and loved it and we are both on SuSE now and love it too. And you are right, why review the installation procedure? Linux is free, installing is quick. It is the long term that matters most in a review. Even OpenBSD and FreeBSD were easier to install than Mandrake 8.1! – Thanks
A grumpy review, but it does hit a really valid point, and it’s one that I’ve seen come up in all sorts of contexts (particularly in OS comparisons). There are various quirks among all the distributions but by and large most Linux (and BSD) distributions have installation down to a point where more improvements are just icing–and they’ve been that way for several years. (Ironically the ones that give the most problems are often the ones that try to be too smart, like Mandrake’s.)
There is one installation problem most distributions haven’t attended to yet. In my untutored and uncouth opinion, until most Linux distributions automatically recognize and configure sound cards and video cards and offer an applet to let you change display resolution/bit depth (both permanently and temporarily) on the fly, they’re missing a crucial “ease of configuration” piece that every other operating system has.
Beyond that, the real “eye candy” they need is font anti-aliasing that’s set up “out of the box”… and a GUI that looks usable at 1024×768. Is it just me and my friends, or do nearly all of the more “modern” applications using GTK or QT waste an awful lot of screen space the way they’ve sized menus, buttons and other widgets?
the shutdown has to be initiated from a terminal, and only as root.
VERY annoying. this could make a network admin very upset in the hands of an inexperienced user.
Direct Frame Buffer is good, and there may be other ideas, but really, I hope linux gets rid of X, or at least the desktop linux’s such as mandrake, lycoris, lindows and all of them get together and help fund directfb or berlin project or something. X Sucks!
You can also shut down from the console. There you can do it as any user. As usual, these things can be customized to your heart’s content.
I installed Mandrake 8.0 in september. It was the first Linux distro that worked better than Windows for me, and I have since used only Linux.
Everything worked nicely! No problem with KDE, licq och gaim… Only XCdRoast was broken, the author complained at his website for them releasing a broken version of his program without contacting him. Nice.
Recently I installed KDE3. I normally boot straight into KDE (without logging in), but Mandrake 8.0 won’t boot straight into it, I have a setup now where KDE2 starts, I have to logout and login into KDE3. Perfect…
Mandrake 8.0 came without any of the journaling filesystems, that’s my only bother now, and that’s why I intend to install something new, I’m waiting for Mandrake 8.3, although I might install Slackware, as the reviews were so good…
WattsM.. YES! The biggest problem for me going between KDE (or Gnome) and Win2K is that the linux GUIs waste an _enormous_ amount of screen real-estate. Just look at the spacing between menu options, or the incredibly fat borders often in place.
Some of these things can be configured (though they should not have to be), but even after I’ve tried my best to squeeze things together, KDE3 wouldn’t feel as compact as I want it.
This just irks me no end. I want to shift over more time to running GUI’d linux, but I just can’t force myself to watch all that wasted space.
Take a screenshot of either GUI and load it up in the other and compare side by side. In linux there always seems to be one bevel too many, or one extra pixel around input-fields, or whatever. And it adds up.
As for distribution, I can only second the recommendation of Debian. Running apt-get is just sooo sweet. However, it is probably not the dist to give complete newbies.
Definitely, debian is *not* for the average user. It’s ugly and the installation process is a little bit buggy and confusing the first time you do it. But then, I changed my apt sources to unstable. I wanted mozilla, I checked mozilla, I got mozilla. I wanted WindowMaker 0.80.0, i dselected it, i got it. And when I got tired all I had to do was to remove it. if it was on a gui, it would have been a matter of three clicks. Someone should come up with a distro as easy to install as mandrake but with the flexibility of debian. That would be the definitive distro.
I just bought Mandrake 8.2 Power Pack today. Installed it on my harddrive, and now about 45 minutes later, I’m typing this.
Overall, I think it is an improvement over prior Mandrake releases, and I’m quite happy. Better than XP! (ohhh, that’s bound to get a flame or two….)
Seems that the old adage is true: a satified customer tells one person, a disatisfied customer tells 10.
The way I see it, Linux is in the middle of a PR war with Microsoft, and the Linux community and press are consistantly badmouthing the distros.The recent spate of negative reviews for Suse 8.0 are a prime example.
Why would anyone switch from windows when even linux users don’t seem to like Linux?
Good thing there are users like me out there who want to try it for themselves, or Red Hat, Mandrake, and Suse would be out of business!
It’s called ‘halt’ when you hit the logout icon.
Regarding Debian, I do want to download it. But acquiring Woody proved to be difficult and I gave up since it was so simple to get Red Hat 7.3, but I’ll get Woody when it’s eventually released and Debian let you ftp ISOs. (At the moment they insist on some crazy new type of file transfer that, well, just doesn’t work!)
I’m glad that I got a positive response to the review; it was just honest experience – something that is missing from most reviews these days.
I also neglected to point out that if GNU/Linux distributions are successful as desktops, then they will come with new PCs, in which case the installation is completely irrelevant – which makes praising distributions as desktop ready based on their installation procedure seem crazy. (Although a simple install definitely is nice.)
Pretty much mirrors my Mandrake experiences. I’m not real knowledgeable, so it hurt a bit more.
The best *nix I’ve installed is OS X. Puts the rest to SHAME 🙂
Pat
Finally, someone who thinks beyond installation. Why do most reviewers think ease of installation = ease of use? Do they reinstall their OS every day?
“There is one installation problem most distributions haven’t attended to yet. In my untutored and uncouth opinion, until most
Linux distributions automatically recognize and configure sound cards and video cards and offer an applet to let you change
display resolution/bit depth (both permanently and temporarily) on the fly, they’re missing a crucial “ease of configuration”
piece that every other operating system has. ”
In a well designed OS, you can run each program at a different screen
resolution if you want to, and of course change them on the fly.
The problem with identifying cards may date from the days of ISA
cards, which AFAIK had no ROM on board to identify them. It should be
possible to identify PCI cards correctly. Of course, somebody has to
maintain an up to date list matching cards to drivers. That’s the kind
of thing you pay for in a commercial distro.
Operating systems shouldn’t just be easy to install. An installation should only happen once anyway! It’s the other 99.99% of the time you use your computer that counts!
Thank you. Thats why I use Debian exclusively. Yeah it takes a little more time to set up and configure. But you only have to do it once. There is nothing that comes close to it for keeping your system up to date. I’m running unstable and it apparently works better than the releases from Mandrake and others.
Yea, if you want to remain in the dark ages.
That review could have been written by me, though I am not that good a writer.
Installed MDK81, worked pretty well with some glitches. Upgraded to MDK82 and found out that it had not improved much. By then I was tired of the whole Mandrake business and went back to the win2k/BeOS combo.
I have been doing this for the last six years, installed Linux to see if it could replace Windows. Hung on to it for a while and then realized it was not ready yet.
Guess I’ll meet Linux again in around 2004, or something.
And btw, the Linux distro that worked best for me so far, was RedHat6.something. It wasn’t that easy to install, but when that was done, it worked pretty smoothly.
I agree with you that most reviews only review the installation. I also think that most reviews are too positive about the distro’s they review. But this one is a bit on the other end of the line, it is too critical imo. It makes it sound as if almost nothing is good. I just can’t believe that.
Also, why do you want to install Cooker packages. They are not meant for Joe Average. They are development packages. It’s even a completely different mandrake version. Like mixing Mandrake 7.2 with 8.2 or so. It uses another glibc, binutils and gcc, so it’s absolutely not compatible.
On a sidenote, I would want to see the cooker source disabled in rpmdrake. Now it is just too easy to set up a cooker source.
Also, the reason that some packages are not the latest whizz-bang version is because you never know what show-stopper bugs that latest version has. Every version of Mozilla has a few show-stopper bugs, which takes a few weeks to get fixes in a development cycle. Also, Galeon, Skipstone and Nautilus depend on Mozilla. If Nautilus breaks on the latest Mozilla, gnome-desktop is broken. That’s not funny.
So, you get some critics back on your review.
I do have to say the grumpy review is a bit refreshing. I hope other reviewers take notice and skip their over-positive reviews, and be a bit more critical.
I’ve never used Debian as Richard Fillion suggested, nor FreeBSD. I would love to see a review on those systems done in the same style as this Mandrake review.
Also, ever think about giving BeOS a try? It’s currently in limbo, but I think that you’ll be surprised at how stable (except for Mozilla betas) it is and easy to use, update and install.
FreeBSD doesn’t have a pretty install, but it works and is easy.
As far as Use and Manageability, I really enjoy using FreeBSD. Running 4.6RC2 and it is great. Using sysinstall to install packages is easy. You still have to know what you are looking for, but Dependencies are resolved automatically.
Hopefully FreeBSD will get the attention it deserves since Apple is using part of it as its core.
IMHO, to write a review having a one week experience
of using a distro is similar to discussing a girl after
spending just one night with her. It’s nonsense.
A review should be written by a person who is running
a distro for at least three or four months, better more.
Actually, for me, GUI shutdown works — unfortunately, it automatically shuts off the power on the box for me too. This wreaks havok with my programmable keyboard.
Anybody know how to tell it to only bring down the system to a point where I can hit the power switch myself?
This “review” is worse than the linked Lycoris review on the pcworld website. All it tells me is that someone had a load of trouble running unfinished applications.
FYI the Lycoris review probably plays well to its intended audience – ie the PCW readership who are mostly on 95/98/XP and may want to try linux for the first time.
Sorry mate, try again.
The Point is that Linux sucks, Mandrake isn’t the easy to use desktop disto hailed by most reviews, and (which is the most important thing) Joe Average can’t use it!!
Being a Happy Mandrake user (and a Joe Average myself) i can’t believe that using Mandrake could be that painful! But maybe i’m not a Joe Average anymore.
Still, some of his points are valid, but 8.2 will not be Mandrake’s last version (at least i hope so).
I have been using Mandrake 8.2 for several months now, and while I am not absolutely in love with it, I have not noticed many of the problems reported here. For me, I have an occassional program crash, but most of them are very stable and even the program crashes rarely force a reboot.
My biggest complaint, and here I have to agree with the review, is the difficult and painfully manual package installation.
“Definitely, debian is *not* for the average user. It’s ugly and the installation process is a little bit buggy and confusing the first time you do it. But then, I changed my apt sources to unstable. I wanted mozilla, I checked mozilla, I got mozilla. I wanted WindowMaker 0.80.0, i dselected it, i got it. And when I got tired all I had to do was to remove it. if it was on a gui, it would have been a matter of three clicks. Someone should come up with a distro as easy to install as mandrake but with the flexibility of debian. That would be the definitive distro.”
Progeny had a gui based thingy, and the distro was debian based, but folded the linux os business
I don’t understand why people complain about manual package installation in mandrake. You don’t have to do it manualy. Have you folks tried ‘rpmdrake’ (aka ‘Software Manager’) ? Even if it have some glitches it does the hard part for you, it automaticaly resolves dependensies for you.
Just select package you need, press ‘ok’/’next’ a couple of times, feed it with CDs (or let it download packages from the net), click ‘quit’ and enjoy your new package. It is as easy as it should be, I think.
remain in the dark ages my @ss! Debian is the linux distro that keeps the most up to date. Maybe you’ve only tried potato, which everyone admits is old. But Woody and Sid are DAMN up to date. Get your facts straight.
I am a debian user of some time now and I admit its the best distribution out there, but lets be honest, its hardly cutting edge:
No XFree86 4.2
No Kde3
Thats for starters
This review was so similar to my Mandrake experience it was eerie. Mandrake is a mess and I will be hard pressed to place it on another harddrive.
I tried Caldera open Workstation, and was very impressed with the overall complete feeling. It’s not bloated with 75 programs of varying degrees of completeness trying to the same thing. Only one window manager and just stuff you need.
Virtually all the packages work and new ones are relatively easy to install with Package Manager.
Still not perfect, to sluggish for my tastes (been spoiled by BeOS), but that’s a fault of virtually any type of linux.
Firstly to Miss Ana Lyric: I wrote the review based on 1 months experience of Mandrake, used every day. Not 1 week. And I think that 1 month is far better than the 1 day that the average review seems to cover. “Oh yeah, it installed brilliantly with ease and… uh… it imports my word documents and uses samba.” I don’t think I’ve ever been told much more by the average review.
Secondly to Jim Potbick who writes, “All it tells me is that someone had a load of trouble running unfinished applications.”: Should I be having this kind of trouble in general? And if you *read* the review, you may have noted that the problems were not so much the unstable applications that I came across but more the troubles with the distribution as a whole such as updates to applications using RPMDrake and problems with how the distribution behaved eck-set-er-a.
Thirdly to criticisms of using the Mandrake Cooker: Are you joking? Since half the packages in Mandrake are out of date upno release, and since the ‘desktop user’ packages, such as instant messaging, mozilla, et al, are still not mature, I want the option to install/update them.
Now, since your average RPM doesn’t include all the packages it depends on, you’re telling me I should have to manually resolve package dependencies? When I tried to install Gabber (just Gabber, a simple IM client) manually, I install/update IIRC something like 7 other packages before giving up because I just could not find – not even on the Mandrake website, Gabber website, RPMfind.net, not Google, not anywhere – the final package I needed. You are expecting Joe Average to go through this hell?
So, what you tell me is 1) run packages that are out of date and/or don’t work anyway (Gabber was, before updating, unstable, as was gaim, as was everybuddy) or 2) sort it all out myself.
As for the person who said so unwisely “but RPMDrake resolves all your dependencies for you”: RPMDrake only tells you your dependencies if you DO NOT have them available from the SOURCES you set up (your CDs to start with), and since installing an updated package usually means NEW dependencies that were NOT included in the Mandrake release, this is not being resolved for you but merely NOTIFYING you. It’s like a Windows install telling you that you need xxx.dll and yyy.dll and zzz.dll; you would be pissed and berate Windows. (Hell, I would.) To have dependencies resolved for you, you either have to use the cooker, or install what’s given to you on your CDs. Evidently there needs to be an inbetween and that’s something for Mandrake to deal with.
Overly critical? No, I wasn’t. I was reviewing the distribution from the perspective of a desktop user who’s new to linux. I was somebody who wanted out of Windows which everybody criticises (including myself) and into linux which people recently have been raving on about as fit for their ‘grandmothers’. But it’s just bollocks, it is complete and utter bollocks. The install is maybe for a grandma, but not further.
There’s just so many glitches and issues that would massively obstruct any ignorant/naive owner who is responsible for maintaining their own PC.
The ‘average user’ would be mystified by Mandrake, completely and utterly. There’s precious little help available at the touch of a button – you have to dig on the web for it and most of your average users just don’t know where to look.
I’ll tell you what, for what Mandrake does, it does 90% well. But with Windows, for what it does it does 99% well. I’m no Microsoft advocate, I hope never to go back to Windows, but 90% well is just not good enough. It means there’s 10% waiting to go wrong, and even if overall my Linux distribution is better than my Windows install that 10% is just a massive barrier.
Linux is THE operating system if you KNOW your stuff. If you know nothing, Windows or Macs are better. My problem is I’m inbetween and I’d rather go free and open than proprietry. Looks like I’d better get learn, ldp.org here I come.
Charlie, your review was well written and very clear. Now from my experiences of the GNU/Linux OS, Mandrake has tried so hard to make things user-friendly that they have reached a crossroad. Being that you have used linux for some time and seem to be a intelligent individial, I can only recommend you change distributions if possible. There are three distributions that IMO reign supreme and they are:
1) Gentoo > http://www.gentoo.org
2) Debian Woody or Sid > http://www.debian.org
3) Slackware > http://www.slackware.org
I have tried all mainstream, and probably ten to fifteen less known distributions and out of those the above three have shown to be both stable and generally more up2date. Also two of the above three have a text based installer, which perhaps will seem hard to install at first but really can be more simple. The third distro Gentoo, is where I decided it doesn’t get any better than this. A good repository of linux distribution information can be found at http://www.distrowatch.com.
Tim
All the linux distros are trying to catch Joe’s Average eye, they make pretty interfaces, easy install,…, and Mandrake has done pretty well on that, compared to other distributions.
But what I thougut It was nice about linux was that it was different, had different goals, and that is changing. I loved the idea of being free, needing less resources, being stable, and being innovative.
Now the focus is on the desktop, and linux is starting to be heavy and buggy. I know it’s not only Linux, it’s Gnome and KDE, and all the companies around. I liked the idea of Blackbox, trying to minimize the use of resources, and going to the point, instead of the looks.
I’m just another Joe Average who tried linux, liked Mandrake, but agree, it’s not perfect.
“Being that you have used linux for some time and seem to be a intelligent individial, I can only recommend you change distributions if possible.”
This is another trait of Linux zealots ..
Somebody posts a negative or unfavorable review of Linux, and they’re told by zealots that the root of their problem is that they were using the wrong distribution! And it doesn’t matter which distro you tried, there’ll be at least a dozen zealots that tell you to try something else, as if there’s one single distro out there that’s somehow going to magically fix all of the problems/difficulties that people have with Linux.
The XKill is mapped to CTRL+ALT+ESC, just like in Slackware. So you don’t need an icon for it.
On top of that, if you kill your taskbar, you can easily recover it.
Just press ALT+F2 and type in kicker and hit Enter.
Really hard, eh?
Gaim dies? That’s most likely an old version of it and it has been significantly improved since then. You don’t mention what version you were using, but 0.58 is out now.
Mandrake installs too much? Well then you should do an expert install and choose less packages. I have a suspicious feeling that if Mandrake installed too few packages, you would bitch and whine about it not installing enough packages by default.
You have an interesting problem with Klipper that you could easily remedy by right-clicking and selecting Disable Actions or whatever it is.
Yet another hard fix.
As for your /home being deleted, you should have put it onto a separate partition, as most Linux documentation recommends. I am sure you would have found that during your “research.”
As for the package manager, you do realize that you can use other GUIs for that, right? Including the ones that are included with Mandrake, or you can get them yourself. On top of that, you can use urpmi and rpm.
3D support for NVidia cards is not included in Mandrake because of NVidia’s licensing. If you have a problem with that, write a GPL driver and submit it to Mandrake. And when is the last time that Windows 98, ME, or 2K picked up your NVidia GeForce card upon installation? NEVER. It doesn’t, so stop bitching about things that “Joe Average” would have to do in Windows as well.
KDE 2.2.2 is the most stable KDE yet. If they had included 3.0 as you indicate they *should* have, then they would have produced a distro as horrid as Red Hat 7.3.
Galeon hasn’t died on me yet in Mandrake 8.2.
It’s easier to install a program in Linux than in Windows. You just obviously don’t know how. Most people (especially newbies) install with RPMs. You download the RPM, click the file, then type in the root password in the box, then click Next, Next, Next, Exit. Really hard!!!!!!
I think that you should stick to your Windows XP. I can hardly believe that a website such as OSNews would publish a junk pile such as this.
Just press ALT+F2 and type in kicker and hit Enter.
Really hard, eh?
Good point; that is rather intuitive. Your average person could easily deduce that. (sigh)
Mandrake installs too much? Well then you should do an expert install and choose less packages.
The biggest problem is that it installs a ton of things without a heck of a lot of guidance to walk new users through what programs do what (and it’s not like the names and icons are always particularly clear–even GAIM, one of the better ones: how many people would know what that means?).
It’s easier to install a program in Linux than in Windows. You just obviously don’t know how. Most people (especially newbies) install with RPMs. You download the RPM, click the file, then type in the root password in the box, then click Next, Next, Next, Exit. Really hard!!!!!!
I got quite a laugh how you say “easier to install a program in Linux than in Windows” and then immediately procede to list a process that has more steps. Classic.
I think that you should stick to your Windows XP.
I completely agree. Not because he’s stupid or anything, but because he demands quality from his operating systems.
The XKill is mapped to CTRL+ALT+ESC, just like in Slackware. So you don’t need an icon for it.
On top of that, if you kill your taskbar, you can easily recover it.
Just press ALT+F2 and type in kicker and hit Enter.
Brilliant Sherlock, you just made my life easier. Now, I’ve read through hundreds of pages of linux documentation and I have never seen these… how do you expect somebody who doesn’t know much about to know these too? If you expect an average computer user to know more than 10 keyboard shortcuts, you’re dreaming.
Gaim dies? That’s most likely an old version of it and it has been significantly improved since then. You don’t mention what version you were using, but 0.58 is out now.
Yes, my point exactly. It was an old version (0.4x with M8.1 and 0.51 with M8.2), and RPMDrake was a pain to upgrade with. And you will also note that Gaim was in fact one of the more up-to-date packages there, given that it only recently moved to 0.58, but I guess that your trolling mind couldn’t grasp the concept that this review was of an experience that started nearly 2 months ago, shortly after the release of 8.2.
It is probably worth noting that I now use Gaim as of 2 weeks ago and I intend to start giving feedback or perhaps even contributions to it.
You have an interesting problem with Klipper that you could easily remedy by right-clicking and selecting Disable Actions or whatever it is.
I can only direct you to the part in the review where I stated “Klipboard which was the first thing to get disabled.” You could at least make your troll comments accurate.
It’s easier to install a program in Linux than in Windows.
Most Windows programs don’t throw up several library and source dependencies that must be found, downloaded, installed, and have their own dependencies resolved. Then you have some issues like cyclic dependencies… are you telling me that as a newbie this was all just ‘so easy’ to you? I’m not saying I have a problem installing an individual, independent RPM. Quite the contrary. But how many RPMs these days have no dependencies? A rare few. Again, if you had read the review, the complaint was of RPMDrake not working well with the ‘up to date’ cooker servers, and hence having to resolve dependencies myself.
KDE 2.2.2 is the most stable KDE yet. If they had included 3.0 as you indicate they *should* have, then they would have produced a distro as horrid as Red Hat 7.3.
Not entirely true, but one of your less trolling comments. I’m not saying they should have included it, but if they had waited 3 months to release 8.2, it would have been more polished, it would have KDE3.0x which is pretty stable and quick, it would have Open Office 1, it would have Mozilla 1, and it may even have Gnome 2. Perhaps they’ve got 8.3 for this – releasing early and often as they do.
Galeon hasn’t died on me yet in Mandrake 8.2.
I have to hold my hands up here, I remembered this morning that I had forced the install of Galeon 1.2.x because one of the packages it depended on was corrupted by RPMDrake, and that was when my corrupted packages problem started. So it’s probably slightly my fault that Galeon isn’t working well. But I did have problems with 1.0.3 crashing on me before I did much with it.
I think that you should stick to your Windows XP.
*Shudders* no thanks, I hated XP when I had to install it for somebody else. It’s a heap of junk. Although the login screen is nice, but that’s it.
I can hardly believe that a website such as OSNews would publish a junk pile such as this.
If your comments were objective and not (almost) pure trolling, I might be concerned by this opinion. But since you can’t fathom the concept that somebody might not know all the hundreds of keyboard shortcuts, or the ins and outs of their system, I’ll just assume that you are one of these people who confuses ‘workstation’ with ‘desktop’ and ‘developer’ with ‘home user’ and you will continue to insist how perfect distributions like Mandrake Linux are for the home user.
On a side note, to the user who stated that Linux was buggy; that’s incorrect. Linux, the kernel, is awesome, as is the GNU/Linux operating system if you know your stuff. Mandrake, Suse, and others, try to put this together into a shiney easy-to-use package. The problem is that in the end it’s only the installation that’s the easy bit, it’s gets steadily harder from there on in.
* A really good point is the fact that going from Gnome to KDE might leave some process running!
This can really be disturbing for a newbie.
* I see many complains on how KDE menues are organised, but I do prefer it than the way it’s done on Windows.
It really depends of your taste so complaining about it is a bit weird I think.
* -A good point: The rpmdrake is just plain bad: quite often it crashes the help windows is not helpfull. It is not even written in the help window that rpmdrake is a GUI over urpmi!
– A BAD point: you complain about cooker: sorry but cooker is for development purpose: NOT for enduser purpose.
If a cooker package break something you have no rights to complains about it!
About other things:
*I agree that Klipboard is garbage but it is easy to deactivate it. And it is a review of Mandrake not KDE.
* As for the automatic activation of 3D in your NVidia card: do not forget 1) it is a propietary driver 2) I’ve read many times Alan Cox complaining about receiving bug reports but the kernel problems where caused by the NVidia driver..
So the end result is: do you prefer stability or accelerated 3D?
I’ve choosed: I have an ATI card :-).
My own problems with Mandrake 8.2 are:
– the wheel of my mouse doesn’t work (it worked OK in 8.1).
X is well configured though. Strange..
– an icon in my desktop is name XawTV /dev/video0.
Ughh, I renamed it many times in just XawTV but when I reboot the modification is not kept.
I tried to modify the files but my modifications are still lost each time I reboot. A bit annoying.
– my sound doesn’t work correctly as usual.
The handling of sound is really bad in Linux (I don’t think it is a Mandrake only problem). I hope that ALSA incorporated in the 2.6 kernel will help.. The 2.6 kernel won’t be released soon though.
At the moment I have 3 options:
1) Use the cooker to (supposedly) get up-to-date packages with my dependencies resolves.
2) Do the dependencies resolving myself.
3) Be out of date, which isn’t always that bad (stability), but is frustrating when some of the prorgams I want to use come with Mandrake in 0.x form and not very stable. The 8.1 selection of instant messengers was a good example of this.
Not good options, and I’ve been criticised for using the first which I saw as the lesser of two evils for updating packages. So just what am I supposed to do?
However, it is all free for which I am grateful and I am persisting with Linux and I will check out Mandrake 8.3 because, mostly, what they have done is really good. It’s just not ready for the ignorant yet and it frustrates me when people claim it is.
>This is another trait of Linux zealots ..
Zealots aren’t just pro-something. Many are anti-something, and you seem to fit the description of “zealot” better than anyone.
Well, did you ever try Right-Clicking on the desktop? Or how’s about looking in your KMenu? If you are used to Windows, then you would have looked there for the Run option instantly.
About Klipper – you didn’t state what you disabled, and I took your comment to mean that you disable Klipper the program, not the “Enable Actions” option of Klipper. You should have been more clear.
And for you to jump to conclusions about whether I read your “review” or not is just stupid.
…between reading and glancing at. The former means you take in most of the words, the latter means you read the parts that stand out to you.
From your ridiculous first post I could only draw the conclusion that you glanced at the review before forming your opinions, hence missing several things.
And to be honest, I think that saying I ‘disabled’ the ‘Klipboard’ is pretty clear, given it’s an option in it’s annoying little pop-up window.
And I really don’t know what you are wittering on about with your ‘right-clicking on the desktop’ or ‘looking in your kmenu’ statements, or even your ‘run option’ comment. At least I don’t know what they are referring to from what I said. (Ironic that you talk about being clear, eh?) Perhaps your attempts to troll have been so distinctly put down that you’re grasping at straws in an attempt to make a point?
Windows does mostly what is says, even if it doesn’t say what it does. Programs are named normally. Oh and it’s so easy to install programs
How quickly we have forotten the growing pains encountered learning DOS, then the advent of Win3.x, Win95, Win98, Win98SE, ME, etc. The numerous “blue-screens-of-death” the security leaks which the little hackers have managed to exploit with a plethora of viruses, trojan-horses and worms…
I remember from DOS 3.x days the average Joe had trouble with differing machines running IBM DOS and MS DOS which were the same but not the same, hardware incompatibilities, then the PC clone nightmares…
Were it not for these shortcomings of Windows, GNU/Linux would not be experienceing the growth we are now seeing. With the rise in popularity if GNU/Linux distributions is there no room for some growing pains here too?
Like DOlson I am a Mandrake user (8.2), yes they messed up the 8.2 download vs 8.2 retail version in their included selections of programs. Yes, there are some things the avarage Joe would indeed have trouble doing, yesthey may have rushed the 8.2 release (they took a lot of bashing from some of the users on that) However, they have theMandrake User Board…were a group of dedicated GNU/Linux users gather and help fix linux woes on an individual basis and teach with step by step instruction when needed. DOlson is a major contributor and has a web site of tutorials…we have a lot of fun there learning GNU/Linux, okay some occasional swearing at Mandrake, but mostly fun. Here is the URL
http://www.club-nihil.net/mub/index.php
Someday computers and operating systems will be idiot-proof, but they will never be damn-idiot-proof!
You said:
Brilliant Sherlock, you just made my life easier. Now, I’ve read through hundreds of pages of linux documentation and I have never seen these… how do you expect somebody who doesn’t know much about to know these too? If you expect an average computer user to know more than 10 keyboard shortcuts, you’re dreaming.
So I said:
Well, did you ever try Right-Clicking on the desktop? Or how’s about looking in your KMenu? If you are used to Windows, then you would have looked there for the Run option instantly.
My point is that the Run dialog is accessible by at least 3 different ways, one of which is identical to Windows, so if you wanna complain about the shortcut keys, then it is a failing argument, because the exact same dialog is found elsewhere. That’s what I meant, and I didn’t think that it’d be that hard to follow, but apparently you only glanced at my post.
——–
Moving on…
Anyway, Joe Average wouldn’t have done ANY research like you did, and would therefore not have tried some of the things you did, and your review does not take that into consideration. However, if you were doing “research,” I find it highly unlikely that you couldn’t have found out solutions to your problems.
Considering that I even have a tutorial for restarting kicker on my site, I know that there is at least one fix readily available online. And there are plenty on MUB, as chany said, and many people willing to help (including me).
No one I know just learned Windows overnight. Even people who can do something advanced like change their desktop wallpaper can’t install it – people like my mom and sisters.
My wife uses Mandrake 8.2, and she has had no problems yet. She does the exact same things she did in Windows, but it never locks up on her. My sisters have Mandrake 8.2 on their old computer, and do the same things that they used to do with Windows too. And they have had one problem with Gaim not keeping their proxy settings, but that was easily fixed, over the phone.
Aside from this, these nearly computer-illiterate people have had no problems with Mandrake 8.2.
I think that part of the problem is that you know too much about computers to actually review Mandrake just as Joe Average would.
However, you also argued that it isn’t so easy to install, which I give you that. However, as I said, none of them can install Windows either, and most Joe Averages don’t. They usually buy their PC with Windows preinstalled.
But anyhow, if you still use Mandrake, and wanna help and get help, I’d love to see you at MUB. If not, then good luck with Red Hat (which is more unstable than MDK8.2, if you didn’t already know).
I agree that most reviews only go as far as install
If one can overlook the horrible graphical bootsplash, which hides apps like kudzu (which causes a few seconds delay on the first boot), 8.2 is one of the best distros out there… I for one have never had any serious problems.
*You can turn off many of the services really easy from within drakconf (Which feels like a Joe Average app, even though it may take a while before they get there)
*There _is_ a list of cooker sources to download from, you just have to retrieve it to get an updated one. (there is a button in rpmdrake)
*I agree that 8.1 was bloated, but 8.2 installs on roughly 160MB (with basesystem and icewm) and via cooker it’s childs’ play to install KDE 3.0.1, gcc 3.1 etc.
*Mandrake badly needed to release a version of their OS, not only becouse they were low on cash but because 8.1 was getting really old. I’d say it was a wise decision to release 8.2 with the packages they put in it, and make sure to have OpenOffice, KDE 3.x together with the base system compiled with gcc 3.1 in their next release (hopefully within 8 months)
*When you remove the third cd from your source list, the packages doesn’t “dissapear” from cooker, but cooker only contain _updated_ packages, not all packages in the dist (Right after a release there are hardly _any_ packages in the cooker). So, naturally, when you removed the third cd, the packages on that cd wasn’t found by rpmdrake. To add a “current” source in rpmdrake is a bit harder than adding a cooker source (bad designdesition), but its definately as easy as adding an apt-source in debian, and it gives you access to all the packages on the cds.
*Urpmi is pretty good at resolving dependencies even on totally new packages.
* NVIDIA driver-rpms are quite easy to install. There are precompiled packages available from their website, together with help on what to change (all that is needed is a ‘Load “glx”‘ entry in XFConfig-4, and driver+GLX packages)
*As for debian to be most up to date… rofl!
*Perhaps a bit too much notice on your personal feeling for apps and desktopmanagers… KDE/Gnome are part of just about any linux dist, and so are the browsers. I admit that we needed some background to why you switched between them all, but still… (on the browserside, I recommend opera =)
*rpmdrake was shipped broken with 8.1, but it works really (!) well in 8.2
If there is one thing that bother me about MDK it is the rpm dependency tree. I really hate to intall MySQL to get the qt3-devel package, it really really bothers me… but i don’t think this is dist-related. I have no info on this, anyone installed it with apt-get?
A bit sorry that you had such a bad experience from such a good dist, but sometimes you’re just unlucky.
Oh well, just felt I had to write something.
Good luck with the other dists!
//Nevermind
Charlie, I just did the whole Manbreak Linux 8.2 experience in about two days. Like the other poster (whose name I forget) I would have written a very similar review of it. Manbreak’s GUI apps are nice little toys, but about they only thing they do well is make for nice screenshots and allow Linux diehards to write advertising blurbs such as the following:
I don’t understand why people complain about manual package installation in mandrake. You don’t have to do it manualy. Have you folks tried ‘rpmdrake’ (aka ‘Software Manager’) ? Even if it have some glitches it does the hard part for you, it automaticaly resolves dependensies for you.
Just select package you need, press ‘ok’/’next’ a couple of times, feed it with CDs (or let it download packages from the net), click ‘quit’ and enjoy your new package. It is as easy as it should be, I think.
I hate penguins.
First, the installation routine is very poorly done. It crashes often if you try to configure things multiple times or back up and reselect different options. The user interface is a joke – whoever laid it out did so in an ad hoc fashion. Buttons aren’t labeled consistently, though they are usually related in some way to what they do.
The network configuration is ridiculous. I have two ethernet cards. eth0 is my LAN connection, while eth1 is my cable connection. Manbreak’s installation routine pops up a helpful dialog allowing you to select your network configuration type. “LAN” and “cable” are amongst the options so I select both. *bzzt* Wrong! Now I must configure both ethernet cards twice each.
The mouse configuration plays havoc with my mouse. If I select anything other than the “Standard” mouse type, the mouse cursor goes berserk and then stays in the top-right corner no matter what I do. The only option here is to reboot and skip the mouse configuration until after the system has been installed. And yes, the PS/2 wheel mouse driver works just fine with my genuine Microsoft PS/2 wheel mouse after installation, if I take the trouble to configure it.
I, too, ran into the infuriating “please insert Disc 1” problem. Also, Manbreak’s installation routine allows you to select software for installation that you simply do not have the source discs for…
I spent most of the two days reinstalling the OS and trying to get rpmBreak to work. You need to have a site where you can download Manbreak RPMs – otherwise your KDE menu items won’t update properly and who-knows-what-else won’t work. Then you need to get the relative path to the synthesis/hdlist file – whatever that is – which is often a multi-megabyte file that takes a long time to download. (The Manbreak source RPMs feature a 15 MB hdlist.cz file – ouch!) I found the directory that holds the synthesis/hdlist file, but let’s see…there are quite a few files with synthesis and/or hdlist in the filename…
After that, cross your fingers and hope the server works well with rpmBreak. I had lots of trouble getting the official Manbreak 8.2 RPMs (not the cooker, mind you, but the release packages) set up as a source. I could use KDE’s web browser to go to the ftp site and drag/drop the packages I wanted into my home folder at ~120 Kbps with no problems whatsoever. rpmBreak was another story; nearly every package had dependencies with timeouts, or dependencies with dependencies with timeouts, which would then prevent entire set of dependent packages from installing. I tried rebooting. I tried waiting a few hours. I tried several other servers. Nothing worked well.
Thinking that something had gone terribly wrong during the installation, I did a clean install. I also ran into the problem described in the review, with slightly different circumstances. I only downloaded the first installation disc .iso, and installed using that, planning to set up ftp sources in Manbreak’s software update app for the rest of the stuff. But if you delete the original installation discs as sources, then none – read: none – of your ftp sources will work. You’ll get a corrupt packages error every single time…
And another thing. If you choose the wrong synthesis/hdlist file, rpmBreak will load up a whole list of RPMs that aren’t even available on that server (for example, a new version of Mozilla) even though the RPMs are nowhere to be found while perusing the ftp site in a web browser. And no, this has nothing to do with the Cracker’s synthesis/hdlist file which is stored at a completely different path. So you’ll just get the corrupt RPM message again and again…
Eventually I gave up on rpmBreak and decided to try urpmi to install KDE 3.0. After all, the KDE 3.0 packages were advertised quite clearly on the Manbreak home page, and the installation instructions were so simple (read them at http://www.mandrake-linux.com/en/ ). You just download the RPMs and use a single urpmi command. *bzzt* Wrong! The urpmi program now tells me that I must download 402 MB of updated packages including a new kernel! Wha…?! I tried to stop the downloading, but that trashed my system and it wouldn’t boot anymore. Oh goody, another Manbreak installation.
After reinstalling Manbreak, I downloaded the minimum required KDE packages and installed them manually using rpm and a web browser. (rpmfind.net is horribly slow for a broadband user, and it frequently stalls, but at least I can always hit cancel and try downloading the file again.) Success! Something actually worked!
Then I tried to install the Manbreak KOffice packages and they, too, worked the first time. Wow!
Then I tried to install KDevelop. *bzzt* Wrong! Mortals aren’t allowed to install development tools! Well, after quite a few hours manually downloading packages, figuring out how to use the rpm command to update packages with circular dependencies and so on…I finally got it installed. And it worked…well, mostly. The documentation didn’t install correctly, resulting in a lot of blank/non-working Help menu entries. (Exactly how is a new programmer supposed to get started in Linux without some decent reference material?) After quite a few attempts to install the documentation, I gave up. And I mean completely, on the whole Manbreak Linux thing.
I tried QNX recently and its software management tool is a dream to use. You check the box, hit install, and it Just Works (TM). You don’t want something on your system? Uncheck the box and hit uninstall. Bammo! it’s gone. Unfortunately, there isn’t much software to use with QNX…
So right now I’m using Windows XP and waiting for a new release of Lycoris, which is actually a fairly decent Linux distribution. In the meantime, I may try this Debian disto that people are recommending, but I don’t expect too much.
My only experience installing Linux involved a free Corel disk from MaximumLinux magazine, which failed miserably (didn’t even install a bootloader) and, since Corel is, for all intents and purposes, dead I could not find help and then Mandrake 8.1. I’ve only been a computer user for 2 years (I’m 36, but never purchased one till two years ago) so I guess, in that respect, I could be considered an Average Joe. I have an above average IQ, so in some respects, I am not an Average Joe. Installing and running 8.1 was no big problem for me. First I selected Recommended mode from the install screen and then went on. Mandrake Linux would not boot, so I went to the Mandrake Expert site and asked for help. A solution was given which worked and I was up and running. It turned out to be a MoBo compatibility problem with the Mandrake 2.4.x kernels. I found solutions to all my problems on the MUO forums as posted above. I’ve crashed Windows more times that I’d like to say…some through faults of my own, some through faults of the OS (Windows 98SE). I’ve installed Windows numerous times (that’s almost always the only way to solve the crash problems) and Windows doesn’t give yo choices for what to install as part of the base operating system either. A bunch of worthless crap that doesn’t work half the time gets installed, too. Some of the problems that I noticed you had were problems that arose because you were doing things the Average Joe wouldn’t be doing in the first place. Anyway, I have heard bad things about MDK 8.2 and I felt the distribution was rushed, so I can’t really argue against your problems with 8.2, but 8.1 works great for this Average Joe.
Charlie’s got a little too much time on his hands !
Manbreak’s installation routine pops up a helpful dialog allowing you to select your network configuration type. “LAN” and “cable” are amongst the options so I select both. *bzzt* Wrong! Now I must configure both ethernet cards twice each.
Well, it isn’t too clear, but if you figure it out, LAN would mean that you are connecting through your LAN to the internet – like through a gateway. If you select just Cable, then config your card that goes to your network once, and your card that goes to your cable modem once, it will work.
You need to have a site where you can download Manbreak RPMs – otherwise your KDE menu items won’t update properly and who-knows-what-else won’t work.
Correct. This does piss me off about Mandrake; however, most Red Hat RPMs will work just fine, I just need to create my own icons.
Oh, and for the record, I hate RpmDrake. I wish Mandrake wouldn’t add ALL the config tools that they do – but some are nearly indispensible.
I tried QNX recently and its software management tool is a dream to use. You check the box, hit install, and it Just Works (TM). You don’t want something on your system? Uncheck the box and hit uninstall. Bammo! it’s gone. Unfortunately, there isn’t much software to use with QNX…
Isn’t QNX mainly for development for embedded devices? I tried it a few times, but I found it to be totally lacking in features. That single-floppy demo is pretty nifty though.
So right now I’m using Windows XP
Poor soul.
and waiting for a new release of Lycoris, which is actually a fairly decent Linux distribution.
I don’t know if I would say that. It crashes and hangs more than Red Hat 7.3. At least the build I tried did.
In the meantime, I may try this Debian disto that people are recommending, but I don’t expect too much.
Debian is pretty nice. Give Woody a try. I am waiting for the ISOs, but Potato was decent.
Maybe…
DOlson: I’m waiting for Woody ISOs too.
A few people have mistaken my review for an ‘attack’ on Mandrake. This it is not.
Mandrake is a good distribution, but it’s not ready for an idiot to use. I see the odd comment that people found the install easy; I’m not debating this. The install WAS easier than Windows.
And there’s a comment that Windows was poor (very poor!) in previous incarnations. But just because Windows used to be so poor isn’t an excuse to brush off problems with the current set of Linux distributions.
BTW, I would take a well set up linux distribution over Windows any day of the week for all those who think I was just bashing linux.
Also, I installed RedHat 7.3 last night, and other than a slightly slower install, Kudzu, and different branding, the installation procedure was almost identical to Mandrakes. So I’m not sure what Mandrake have acheived there apart from a rewrite of Anaconda.
Well, it isn’t too clear, but if you figure it out, LAN would mean that you are connecting through your LAN to the internet – like through a gateway. If you select just Cable, then config your card that goes to your network once, and your card that goes to your cable modem once, it will work.
The connections work fine either way, but the point is that it is a stupid and confusing UI. Where does it tell you that you are creating two separate profiles, each of which include configuration information for every ethernet adapter in the system? It just asks you which connection(s) you would like to set up…and in Windows a connection is a connection, not a profile for a set of connections.
Correct. This does piss me off about Mandrake; however, most Red Hat RPMs will work just fine, I just need to create my own icons.
Oh, and for the record, I hate RpmDrake. I wish Mandrake wouldn’t add ALL the config tools that they do – but some are nearly indispensible.
I ran into this interesting problem after updating mozilla manually. It would be nice if some of the Linux standardization projects eliminate some of these problems. Thanks for the info about using RedHat RPMs.
I don’t really mind distributions bundling their own GUI configuration tools – I think it’s a good idea. The problem is that they are usually very poorly written. They crash often, fail to warn you of time-consuming tasks, don’t give descriptive error messages, provide even less descriptive documentation, don’t give you a decent progress meter, etc. For example, rpmBreak’s “fetch” progress meter doesn’t even work on my system – of what use is that?
Isn’t QNX mainly for development for embedded devices? I tried it a few times, but I found it to be totally lacking in features. That single-floppy demo is pretty nifty though.
I tried QNX 6 from an .iso and it worked quite well. I just mentioned it because the “package manager” is quite good, very simple, intuitive, and stable.
So right now I’m using Windows XP
Poor soul.
It runs 12+ hours a day, often without a reboot; never crashes or locks up; installs patches, new software, and drivers painlessly; performs better than KDE/MacOSX and has excellent font antialiasing via ClearType; system restore; a decent filesystem; stable drivers; it plays all my games; etc. Ditto for my Dad’s PC. Oh and I build them from scratch – I don’t trust store-bought PCs. I was trying other platforms simply because I wanted to learn what needs to be done to develop portable software.
The only times Windows XP has been unstable was:
1. With McAfee VirusScan 6.0 installed, arguably one of the worst software packages ever created for Windows XP. It even carries the made for XP logo, even though its default installation enables an auto-update service that consistently crashes AND the virus scanner itself causes random crashes in Windows. Solution: Use Panda.
2. With StarDock’s SkinStudio XP installed, perhaps the WORST software package to be installed on my system since Netscape 6.0. (And I might add, NS 6.0 crashed no less than 15 times during net installation.) SkinStudio causes random crashes in Explorer, and theme software itself is quite buggy and not terribly useful. I hate theming software. The only halfway decent theme manager I know of is at TGT Soft’s Style XP, available through a link at http://www.themexp.org
Other than that, the OS Just Works.
Mandrake is a good distribution, but it’s not ready for an idiot to use. I see the odd comment that people found the install easy; I’m not debating this. The install WAS easier than Windows.
o_0
Is that taking into account all the reinstallations I went through because of problems with the system, or is that just the one or three initial installations?
Debian is pretty nice. Give Woody a try. I am waiting for the ISOs, but Potato was decent.
I thought Woody was available…but perhaps it was potato. Can I download potato and update, or is this going to cause some problems?
I don’t know about updating from Potato…
If you have a decent connectin, you can install Woody, but there are no ISOs yet.
I am not doubting your experience with WinXP. But let me tell you mine:
I had it installed on both my system and my wife’s system (before it came out, back in September, good ol’ Copr. ISO.). NOTE: I don’t pirate software anymore, and I have a legal copy of Win98SE, which is the only Windows OS I have installed here, on one PC, and it rarely is used.
So, back to my story.
The stupid search companion wouldn’t work unless I was connected to the internet, and I therefore couldn’t do any searches unless I was connected. That sucks if you are on dialup. Big time.
One day, after about three weeks of using XP and Mandrake 8.1 alternately, but mostly XP, I got up in the morning before school. I rebooted into Windows, because I was going to check my email. Just as the splash screen ws going to come up, I get a BSOD instead. It said something to the effect of “Bad Pool Call” and some other numbers and crap that don’t help me at all.
I try rebooting. Same thing. Over and over. I finally get into safe mode, and I try changing different settings, but nothing works. So I copy my important data to my 15GB drive. I decided that enough is enough and I put on WinME instead.
I thought, well, at least my wife’s PC is still fine.
Her system, which had only WinXP at the time, was on for 15 days straight. No reboots, no crashes, nothing. I know this because the LAN icon told me the uptime of the LAN.
So, I was installing VNC or something like that on her computer, and I go and hit the dumb Power button on the keyboard, which is in the spot where the Print Screen button should be. Down goes Windows. It is now safe to turn off my computer.
Sad that I just totally killed her uptime, I reset the machine. I was almost a firm believer in WinXP’s stability at the time, aside from my mishap.
So, her machine starts to boot. Bammo. BSOD, “Bad Pool Call” – exact same thing.
I backed up her important data in safe mode to her second partition, then I formatted and put on Win2K.
I then began trying really hard to use Mandrake. I switched over nearly instantly. By mid October I had stopped using Windows for anything aside from games and video capture, and DVDs, which is rare.
One day, my wife says to me “What is Linux?” She had heard me talking to a friend and showing it to him.
I showed her a bit of it and she said “Can you put that on my computer when you get a chance?” I was shocked. Someone ASKED for Linux? And my wife, at that! The most computer-illiterate person I know was asking for the “hard” OS on her computer.
So I complied, and now she runs only Mandrake. Once, I screwed her filesystem up by setting it to UDMA100 on a UDMA66 motherboard/drive combo… Whoops! I was still able to get to a terminal, but I couldn’t start X, so I was able to scavenge some of her more important data via the commandline, by backing it up onto my machine through our cross-over cable network we had going.
I decided it would be a perfect time to try out Red Hat 7.2 because everyone was raving about it at my school.
I put it on, she saw their logo and said “Take that off my computer and put Mandrake back on. It looks gay.” I laughed so hard! Red Hat’s logo is gay? Red Hat? The big Linux company? It was funny. To me.
So off it goes and Mandrake goes back on. Two days later, 8.2 was released. D’oh! All that installing and formatting just so I could do it again!
So anyhow, somewhere along the line, about February or March, I finally bought a copy of Win98SE, not because I need it, but because I felt bad about pirating and using Windows so much in the past.
I still use it on the rare occasions that I want to play a game other than Unreal, Unreal Tournament, RtCW, Doom, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, and Baldur’s Gate II.
So that’s my story… A bit longer than what I meant it to be, but anyhow…
If you know how to tinker with the system and if you want to tinker with the system, it’s good distribution.
For Joe Newbie – it’s not ready. No way.
Graphical configuration tools are looking as some “put-it-together-quick-and-dirty” hack that has never passed true usability checks. Can’t Mandrake hire somebody that knows how to make good GUI? So does the installer – it does its work, but somehow looks ( not works, just looks) very unpolished.
rpmdrake – it should show in graphical window what it shows in console – all the progresses and such. It’s not that hard to do, and the user instantly sees, what happens, and no need to run rpmdrake from the terminal. BTW, Joe Average doesn’t know it is called “rpmdrake” – he is used to Windows – Start Menu, here and here, “Software Manager”.
Just some string of text and some progress indicator. “Retrieving file such and such”, “========50%” and all is just clearer.
‘Right-click the desktop, go to “Run” , key in “kicker” and continue ‘ – excuse me, it’s not acceptable. Where is a Joe Average supposed to find the information that the panel is run by the “kicker” executable? Is that told to him by the installation program? No. Is that told to him by the KDE itself in some graphical way? No. You know “kicker”, I know, some other advanced experienced KDE user knows. Not Joe Average. For him, losing his panel would just mean re-login or even reboot.
I wish these companies would pool their resources and work.
Some things are fixed in comparison to Mandrake, others are broken.
The first time I load up KPPP it demands the root password to continue. And it wouldn’t accept the root password, but if I pull up a console, su, pass, kppp – then it runs fine.
But there are places where Mandrake’s work starts to show.
The KMenu in Red Hat 7.3 is soooooo incomplete, missing off half of your installed packages – basically only the KDE applications show.
And there’s the little things like the horribly small browser fonts, or the erratic focus changing when using the arrow keys.
Bah humbug. I hope Mandrake 7.3 or United Linux are good.
Or maybe I should just learn how to fix it all myself.
I think I’ll try Woody when it’s out, but I’ll probably end up going with Lycoris Update 2.
The stupid search companion wouldn’t work unless I was connected to the internet, and I therefore couldn’t do any searches unless I was connected. That sucks if you are on dialup. Big time.
Actually, I didn’t have broadband until quite recently, and the search companion worked just fine for me when I was offline. I had my 56K connection set up for the home network via Windows ICS on my PC, no problems. Except of course the annoying redial option which tended to pop up during games…to be fair, I forget whether that was on by default or if I unwittingly enabled it. Anyway, a dialup connection is just a big hassle to share…
The search problem you described probably had something to do with the pirating process (poor CD, mismatched files, etc.), as I’ve never heard of it and I don’t see anything about it in the KB.
So, I was installing VNC or something like that on her computer, and I go and hit the dumb Power button on the keyboard, which is in the spot where the Print Screen button should be. Down goes Windows. It is now safe to turn off my computer.
I did that once with the sleep button on a Microsoft keyboard during a game, but as it was just “sleep” I could bring it back up. I never use power-saving modes anyway because the people who design motherboards are typically too stupid to implement them correctly, and even if they aren’t some other part of the system is likely incompatible with their particular implementation.
One day, after about three weeks of using XP and Mandrake 8.1 alternately, but mostly XP, I got up in the morning before school. I rebooted into Windows, because I was going to check my email. Just as the splash screen ws going to come up, I get a BSOD instead. It said something to the effect of “Bad Pool Call” and some other numbers and crap that don’t help me at all.
I suppose this is not very helpful now, but it may be interesting:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314…
The basic idea is that it was a corrupted driver or a service of some kind. That’s probably why you could start in safe mode…and if that is the case system restore could have fixed it in a few minutes. It’s hard to believe this could have been caused by pirated software because it worked before, but I suppose that it is possible. More likely, though, there was a bad installation routine or some kind of update that failed the last time you were in Windows, and it just showed up when you tried to load Windows the next time.
On a side note, the Manbreak bootloader does something wierd to my video card on a cold boot – the boot menu screen gets all garbled I have to reboot or my video card won’t work properly in Windows XP. Wierd. Neither the QNX or MS bootloaders exhibit this strange behavior…
Well, this news item will probably disappear soon. Nice talking with you!
‘Right-click the desktop, go to “Run” , key in “kicker” and continue ‘ – excuse me, it’s not acceptable. Where is a Joe Average supposed to find the information that the panel is run by the “kicker” executable? Is that told to him by the installation program? No. Is that told to him by the KDE itself in some graphical way? No. You know “kicker”, I know, some other advanced experienced KDE user knows. Not Joe Average. For him, losing his panel would just mean re-login or even reboot.
That wasn’t my point. Seeing as how Charlie knew what the taskbar was called, then he could have tried to restart it. If Joe Average did half of the research that he did, then they would know what it was called too, and maybe they would get the idea to just try restarting kicker. That’s how I figured it out. I just guessed.
But I use the Run dialog often. It is my friend.
I wasn’t complaining about the difficulty of finding the run dialogue though.
The best way to get an unintuitive interface is to let the programmers who wrote the software design the interface. Why? They don’t need the interface to be intuitive, because they already know how it works. Also, what may be perfectly logical to the programmer might be completely unintuitive to the new user; i.e., the new user expects pointing the kill cursor on an app displayed in the kicker to kill the app.
The only way an interface will become more intuitive is by listening to user feedback. A programmer can learn to anticipate user feedback, but he must be conscious of it when designing the interface. This requires experience and skill; it’s just not easy for a programmer to look at his software like a newbie. It’s kind of like proofreading your own work – it will sound fine to you because you wrote it, and learning how to look at your own work objectively is quite hard.
I believe that the thrust of Charlie’s article is that Linux distributions will need better GUI-based tools if they are to attract – and keep – newbies.
For users who are used to MS Windows, especially those who have gone beyond Joe Average use of the operating system, a first time switch to another operating system can be frustrating. As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker while training him to be a Jedi, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” This is very important, for when you switch from MS Windows to another operating system you essentially and instantaneously go from Intermediate/Advanced User to Novice User. My point here is to be open minded and patient when trying another operating system, and except the pain you’ll get when taking to it like a pro when you’re actually clueless.
With that said, I have practically defined the review as being biased. However, it’s still a good review for going beyond ease of installation and package goodies. I would like to see more of these types of reviews, but from more experienced Linux users who can pick things apart with better definition and explanation.
As for those who get BSOD’s on Windows XP when booting, I have discovered a semi-fix for this on my computer. Frequent defragmenting of the hard disks, notably the drive the OS is on, seems to reduce this problem dramatically. Still, the best advice for avoiding BSOD’s is to leave your computer on all the time and just take advantage of APM to minimize power consumption and premature wearing of hardware. BSOD’s are rare while running, unless you’re playing a game or something else that will use drivers that allow direct access to the hardware and essentially sidestep the protection of HAL.
I wasn’t complaining about the difficulty of finding the run dialogue though.
Okay, WTH?????
Damn internet and it’s stupid not being able to convey meaningful text messages to people.
Heh.
For users who are used to MS Windows, especially those who have gone beyond Joe Average use of the operating system, a first time switch to another operating system can be frustrating. As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker while training him to be a Jedi, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” This is very important, for when you switch from MS Windows to another operating system you essentially and instantaneously go from Intermediate/Advanced User to Novice User. My point here is to be open minded and patient when trying another operating system, and except the pain you’ll get when taking to it like a pro when you’re actually clueless.
I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Charlie is not a Linux newbie; he simply wrote his article about his experiences with the distribution from the perspective of a Linux newbie in order to evaluate the often-made claim that Linux is ready for use by Joe Average. I can appreciate the sentiment, but how is your post even remotely relevant to this discussion?
As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker while training him to be a Jedi, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” This is very important, for when you switch from MS Windows to another operating system you essentially and instantaneously go from Intermediate/Advanced User to Novice User.
I can accept that there are different ways of doing things under Linux, but I certainly won’t accept it as a blanket statement to ignore all usability issues for new users. That would be ridiculous and biased.
With that said, I have practically defined the review as being biased.
The review is not biased. Bias is denial of certain facts in order to draw the conclusions one desires to draw, whereas Charlie simply conducted the review from a Linux newbie’s perspective. This does not, in and of itself, make it biased.
(Why is this concept so hard for some people to understand? They claim that Linux is ready for the mainstream, yet when mainstream users relate their difficulties with a distribution they then claim that only a Linux expert can render fair criticisms. Ack!)
Okay, WTH?????
Because having to open a terminal and execute “kicker” to restore the little gray thingy at the bottom of the screen is unintuitive to newbies, for obvious reasons.
(I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Charlie is not a Linux newbie; he simply wrote his article about his experiences with the distribution from the perspective of a Linux newbie in order to evaluate the often-made claim that Linux is ready for use by Joe Average. I can appreciate the sentiment, but how is your post even remotely relevant to this discussion?)
Maybe you’re right about that. :/
(I can accept that there are different ways of doing things under Linux, but I certainly won’t accept it as a blanket statement to ignore all usability issues for new users. That would be ridiculous and biased.)
I wasn’t trying to make a blanket statment about the usability of Linux compared to MS Windows, but more in reference to configuration (namely post install of software, etc.). And since you’re probably a Linux user, and most likely have used MS Windows, you can probably understand how different the two operating systems can be when you go beyond the GUI. This is not to say the GUI is irrelevent, but it seems overplayed.
(The review is not biased. Bias is denial of certain facts in order to draw the conclusions one desires to draw, whereas Charlie simply conducted the review from a Linux newbie’s perspective. This does not, in and of itself, make it biased.)
Extensive experience with one product can lead to a mild form of bias when it comes to look and feel, etc. However, I do appologize for the ill-formed blanket statement of the article being biased as a whole.
(Why is this concept so hard for some people to understand? They claim that Linux is ready for the mainstream, yet when mainstream users relate their difficulties with a distribution they then claim that only a Linux expert can render fair criticisms. Ack!)
I never said that only a Linux expert could render fair criticism. Infact, I think it’s good to get prespective from all angles. I just feel that Linux doesn’t get picked apart enough in the right areas. The GUI is only relevant to general usability. As a long time Windows user, I feel insulted by all those lame reviews that act like we’re all point-and-click clowns. How about reviews with more detailed coverage of post installation of software and drivers off the internet compared to MS Windows? Or just general configuration? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but it seems to me that reviews from a Windows-to-Linux migration perspective are biased toward the point-and-click user who will only ever use what’s already there. I understand Charlie was trying to fill this void to some extent, and I applaud him for it. But he should go further. Maybe I should have said this from the beginning, rather than being so vague.
I’ve been testing out a number of distros for use in a university lab environment. I’ve installed Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 many times on various hardware configurations ranging from 200 Mz Pentium, to Dell PII-300 laptop, to P4-1.2GHz. I found the install to be very easy, whether taking over the whole hard disk or dual-booting with Windows. All hardware was detected properly. Mandrake 8.2 even automatically detected my wireless card and installed a working driver on the laptop. I also liked that it provided easy setup of NTP for automatic clock setting. I have installed and removed numerous apps. post-install and have noticed that dependencies were taken care of properly and automatically. I’ve done an update from 8.1 to 8.2 without mishap. I’ve linked in other software sources and security update sources without problems.
Once installed, I found the desktop environments to be very well integrated and relatively free of buggy software. Even Open Office, which is not installed by default in 8.2 — and comes with a warning of instability — actually works pretty well (better than KOffice). Significantly, no matter which desktop/window manager you choose on log-in, you see the same software menus and things work the way you expect (try that with Red Hat). The configuration tools in Mandrake Control Centre work well and are intuitive to use.
I like that there were many apps. to choose from. I did not find the organization particularly confusing.
Having tried out several other distros (including Red Hat, SuSE, Lycoris, Debian), I still like Mandrake as a good, low-hassle, full-featured distro with a lot of attention paid to the desktop environment (I have no real complaints about SuSE either, but less experience with it).
Perhaps I did overreact a bit, but I still think that GUI configuration tools is very important to Linux if it’s going to become more widely used.
Steve Carr’s post makes me feel like he was somehow transported here from an alternate dimension where Manbreak 8.2 is a “good, low-hassle, full-featured distro.” *shudder*