Submitted by “Mandriva Linux, once the most popular desktop GNU/Linux distribution, still enjoys an enthusiastic following and a positive cashflow, and has settled into the niche it established in 1999: a technologically advanced operating system that’s easy to install, configure, and use without dumbing everything down. Last year’s merger with Conectiva and Lycoris more than doubled the size of the company, bringing together hundreds of dedicated and experienced employees to further challenge the Red Hat and Novell desktop GNU/Linux stalwarts. Below are interviews with three of those everyday people.”
I think you should step up on that proofreading, Adam. Mandriva’s English in their products and web sites is atrocious.
I’m not responsible for proofreading everything, only for PR. I do other stuff if people send it to me and it’s not _too_ huge, but frankly I’m not getting paid enough to go through the whole of mandriva.com, or the distro itself. (I did offer to revise every package description both for consistency and for grammatical correctness as a one-time contract job, but that proposal wasn’t accepted).
I was just giving you a hard time. You probably don’t remember, but during the Mandriva + Lycoris merger I talked to you about the bad English in #mandriva-cooker that was in the installer “advertisements” in the Discovery/LX installation. I do realize that you can’t possibly proofread everything.
oh, yeah, I remember that now. I did report it and provide fixed versions, dunno if anyone ever used them =)
I’ve been using SLED since it came out, and I’m often tempted to try and re-install Ubuntu just fo Sh*ts and giggles, but I know I’m going to go back to Mandriva (been using every version since 7.1). Ubuntu is the flavor of the day and that’s good for linux as a whole (I suppose), and SUSE (especially SLED) is so polished and it just works great, but no other distro combines ease of use and pure power like Mandriva. SUSE stears you into doing things their way, Ubuntu just ins’t there yet, but Mandriva just lays it all out for you. If you want to do everything by hand, you can, without pulling teeth. If you want to use their tools, you can. I’m downloading their mini .iso now because the real beauty of Mandriva is their community. There are a wealth of powerusers using Mandriva and they don’t flaunt their knowledge like some of the brats I’ve seen in other communities. Most of the info provided by the Mandriva/Mandrake community is Linux agnostic, which just doesn’t seem to register in the Ubuntu community (perhaps that’s becuase so many of their users are new to linux). Mandriva’s desktop neutrality for development makes it really easy to do development using QT and GTK along with all the various scripting languages. I would have to say that in the past Mandriva has provided a better experience under KDE than Gnome, but they seem hell bent on balancing that out with each release.
The only real problem I see with Mandriva today is the yearly release cycle instead of releasing every 6 (somtimes imitating your competitors is the best method of survival) and a lack of advertising in North America(if you have a great product but no one knows about it you fighting a loosing battle)