LinxForums reviews Mandriva 2007, and concludes: “If Mandriva could have improved their packages, their artwork and fix a few little things here and there they could have made this release the best on the market. They got really close though, and although I can find things to criticize I am still very impressed by some of the innovations and the overall quality.”
Well, its not quite my experience. I am giving up on getting an upgraded machine working properly, its totally hosed, and will have to resort to copying the files using Knoppix or Mepis or something. Then a new machine, on which One went in properly, is very flaky. Installed the Gnome version of One, and then downloaded KDE, after which of all things starting OO in Gnome crashes X. KDE does seem to work ok, which is a surprise considering it was installed as a supplement.
Contrary to the reviewer, I think this one could easily sink Mandriva. At the moment I’m sratching my head trying to figure out how to get out of it and into Debian with the minimum of damage, and feeling enormously grateful that I (a) backed up first (b) avoided doing this to anyone else!
My very sincere advice on this one would be, do not do it. Do not try 2007 Free. Do not use One, at least not Gnome. Wait for some maintenance release in several months. This one was just not ready to go out the door.
Reminds me of a good friend with a well known British classic car addiction. His wife said to me one day with a weary smile that he spent more time under them than driving them. That’s certainly my experience with this one.
Edited 2006-10-16 20:10
Asian hookers are the same way…
Since the name change i really can’t get myself to try ‘Mandriva’ it just sounds horrible, Mandrake just sounded so much cooler
IMHO, the best to Mandriva 2007 would to be released in 1st January. Not because of the version name, but giving three months for more tests, to grow the repositories (that didnt work for me when I tested, and only two was available), Mandriva would have a killer distro.
I dont think to have a distro every six months its a must have. Thats bullshit. I dream with the day I will upgrade my system once a year (or less) and have a really solid distro. I still use LE2005 and will wait for some more months until the errata list stops increasing in size.
I moved from LE2005 to Ubuntu 5.10. I wouldn’t go back to Mandriva now.
I moved from LE2005 to Ubuntu 5.10. I wouldn’t go back to Mandriva now.
My experience is similar.
After Gael Duval left Mandriva I spent a considerable amount of time trying out different distros, including Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Overall I didn’t think any were better than Mandriva. No distro is perfect, each has good and bad points and the user must decide what is important to him.
I am going to continue using Mandriva, it has a lot of features I appreciate, though like others I won’t be installing this release on my primary machines for a few months yet.
No, its not just a distro like any other with plus and minus points. 2006 was that. 2007, either the free or the Gnome One versions, are simply unusable.
But don’t believe me, get a spare machine, install Free. Then when that doesn’t work, install One Gnome, use rpmdrake to install KDE and a few other window managers, and try to use them. Half of them will crash X. Then decide you want to retheme kde. You will pretty soon find yourself unable to read the drop down bookmark entries in firefox because the font is white, and you can’t figure out a way to make it black. In OO you find yourself typing on some absolutely infernally colored background. Yes, I know, it can be fixed.
Reading this thread to see if anyone has problems, you will be prompted to reply, and now you’ll fnd yourself typing in white letters on a mauve background…
It goes on and on. This is not 2006 or anything like it. This is not a few months away. This is not even RC1. In fact, I’m not even sure its Beta.
And this is a real Mandriva fan talking. I wish it were different, but its the way it is on two machines. Well, the second one is even worse – its unbootable. I’ve been using Mandriva for years, since 7 or 8, but this is a real letdown.
This is strange. You are the first person from which I see such things reported with Mdv 2007. Most users I know have very solid and perfectly working Mandriva boxes now.
Sure, some people ran into probs, but none of those that you described. The probs were mostly hardware that isn’t supported (same old story with every new Linux-distro release). And my boxes aren’t problematic either (except one printer that worked in 2006 not working properly in 2007). They just work and work and work and work.
Maybe you got a corrupt dowload? ^^
It is very odd. But its installs from two disks: 2007 covermounted, and also One Gnome by download. Its on two different machines, one an upgrade, one a clean install. And finally, Etch installs fine on the second machine – because I’m typing from it now.
So rather sadly, the reasonable thing to do is stay with Etch…
Not a chance, we all check the iso download with the md5sum provided.
tmanop2006 got it, the mandriva distrib, when you heavily use it, is an overall deception.
You install one or two new apps and the system is going crazy enough to go search the web for any solution available. I did this during one year, learned a lot, but lost a lot of time too.
Now I’m on Ubuntu, and I did tried Fedora Core and Suse before switching to Ubuntu.
The only difference is the package management system, if you look at it. RPM vs DEB and I like DEB much better than RPM. It’s much more solid. Not in theory, but in practice.
Oh did I said that Suse RPM are a lot better than Mandriva ? But again the Yast for me is not a tool, it’s a weapon of mass destruction.
Mandriva 2007 looks beautiful. At least in the beginning.
Read the complete review to know what I mean.
http://www.cmsoft.net/linux-ultimate/mandriva/2007/
You can skip the introduction to linux and go right to the page 11 if you know Linux well.
http://www.cmsoft.net/linux-ultimate/mandriva/2007/?n=11
Edited 2006-10-17 06:27
NOT! Sorry, but anyone writing a professional review really should stay away from sentences like:
“I won’t be using Mandriva only because of the MCC shity thing.”
I’ve seen Mandriva, and the problem isn’t with MCC, it’s the whole OS in general. Ubuntu, SuSE, or Debian seem to be the stand-outs.