Submitted by After the technical specifications were mostly finalized recently, a new page has been created on the Mandriva Wiki which gives a guide to the most interesting user-facing features that will be included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including the latest GNOME, KDE and kernel releases, Compiz Fusion, a new network management tool and more. Also available are the more in-depth technical specifications, and the development schedule providing the targeted dates for the various development releases and the final release.
It looks like Mandriva 2008 is going to be a great release. After the problems in previous years, Mandriva 2007.0 and 2007.1 have been very good releases, and with 2008 I hope they will regain their highest reputation.
Right now, Mandriva is the only distribution truly committed to KDE, and therefor the best one for those who like a good KDE desktop out of the box (Ubuntu is the best GNOME, but Kubuntu is not on par yet, IMHO).
I’m really looking forward for the next release. Thanks to the Mandriva team!
Seems there’s a lack of interest in Mandriva (judging by the number of comments so far), too bad.
The list of planned features is actually impressive.
And Mandriva has not been a bad distribution at all, lately.
My only complaint is that they support any given release for six months. OpenSuse has about two years (I think) of suport, and Fedora has about one year.
Two releases plus one month, actually.
Support lifetimes for Mandriva releases are listed here:
http://www.mandriva.com/en/security/productlifetime
each mainline release gets 12 months of desktop support and 18 months of base support (that’s critical packages like the basesystem and major server applications).
We’re still doing regular updates for Mandriva Linux 2007 which came out well over a year ago now, and many developers are still doing backports for it too.
My only complaint is that they support any given release for six months.
Maybe it is because I have been running Gentoo so long but I don’t tend to pay attention to releases in any Linux distribution.
By supporting a release do you mean providing updates?
If you’re doing the updates aren’t you incrementally getting closer to the next release?
In Gentoo they just have releases once a year for the hell of it. Okay, its 2007, someone make a LiveCD. But for those of you who installed 2006, an emerge -uDNv world will get you to the same place.
Does Mandriva not have a similar mechanism? Or do their releases freeze all applications at a particular version and only do bug / security fixes?
yes. same as other stable-release based distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Debian et al), we have a development distribution which is continuously updated with the latest versions of apps and improvements to packages etc. When we wish to prepare a release we go into a stabilization phase for a period of time to bring the development distro into a stable, release-able state, freeze it and branch it, and call that a release.
The branch for each release is given security and bugfix updates only. Recently we added a /backports repository for stable releases where new versions of apps can be provided when user demand warrants it, built against that stable release.
The ‘support’ and ‘updates’ being discussed here are the security / bugfix updates for each stable release.
If you want a more Gentoo-like experience on a stable-release type distro, you can just track the development branch (Debian’s ‘sid’, Mandriva’s ‘Cooker’, Fedora’s ‘rawhide’ etc).
How tragic indeed… that people love to desperately grasp every possible chance to bitch on any Linux distributions that doesn’t sky rocket. Its a damned cold world. If I should call you a friend, then I would not like to have many enemies!
Are you talking to me?
What are you talking about?
There must be a misunderstanding, please reread parent.
I’m actually running 2007.1 right now, and I have been quite impressed by it so far. Hopefully they will continue to pay as much attention to detail as they did for this release so that they continue to release solid products rather than repeat the mistakes of the past.
2008 looks like it will be a very nice system feature-wise; if their quality control remains it could be a dynamite release.
I’m a “bleeding edge” type guy so I run cooker on my laptop and I don’t have any problems at all 2008 will be the “dynamite release”
Keep up the good work!
I’m like you. I always install the released version and then follow the cooker. I very seldom see problems. Except peut etre when some concepts totally change, e,g, when a new breed of KDE is released, but that is acceptable I think.
And YES!!! 2008 will be a “sortie canon”!!!
I know that work for Mandriva, so I would like to ask you about the followig announcement:
http://www.mandriva.com/en/company/press/pr/here_comes_the_spring_a…
This is where I found the basis for my previous statement about the short support cycle. Any clarification you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
That’s about the *release cycle*, not the support lifetime. It was announcing our move (back) from releasing every 12 months to releasing every 6. Just because we release a new version doesn’t mean the old one stops being supported.
I differentiate between release cycle and life cycle (which was the expression used in the article). To me, life cycle is the support for any given product.
yes, I see what you mean: we can’t change the press release now, but I’ll consider your point for future ones. And at least you know the score now