“Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1 is now available on public mirrors. This first alpha is available only through Free version, 32 and 64 bits DVDs. This development release is the first one realized without mkcd, our historical build tool, but using bcd available also on Mandriva svn. This new tool should improve global quality of our release and make tests much easier and efficient… Final release of 2010 version is due the 21st of October.”
How many people in the world uses Mandriva ?
Almost people speaks about: ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora.
Even if Mandriva is a good distribution, it isn’t so widely used !
Well, probably Mandriva has a lot of KDE fans. I used all three you mentioned in your post, starting with Kubuntu Feisty which was a good release, than things started to go down. In Heron my laptop keys stopped working, software received less and less testing to the point that Ibex felt like a distro where the only quality testing was “if it compiles and starts up, it’s ok. I remember having Gwenview plus kipi-plugins freshly ported to kde4 that wouldn’t show up in Gwenview (so I couldn’t batch resize images for instance) – and I have tons of examples like that which led me to OpenSuse.
Opensuse is a nice distro, there was a huge difference in the quality of their KDE implementation, however, I didn’t like the package management. The interface was OK, install speed ok, but for some reason downloads often timed out when downloading synthesiz.blah files on from their packman repositories. Moreover, if you wanted updates to KDE you had to add KDE4:Factory repo, which was OK, but then I learned that I have to keep a constant eye on changes around repos so I don’t end up with alpha quality software – so it was a hassle.
Next was Mandrake, and so far it was the most polished KDE distro I have tried. Everything worked flawleslly, their package management is way better in many respects (speed, easy of use), there was one little snag however: timely updates. When finally I switched to Fedora (a week ago) they still hadn’t have any updates to KDE 4.2.2. Their administration tools compare well with those of OpenSuse, in fact I thought they were better organized and easier to use.
Finally I ended up with Fedora – timely updates, good packagement, complete lack of good GUI admin tools and the menu is a complete mess. Like you have Printing in System menu that has most of the settings, but the hplip package installs in admin (core system settings), and then you have a separate settings menu with 2 entries: wallet management tool and kmenu editor. Still, having used linux and freebsd for quite some time, that’s less of a problem for me than to the average user, which leads me back to my main point.
Probably from all these distributions Mandrake is the best for new linux (KDE) users. Oh, and they have a nice alternative classic style menu (way better organized than the classic menu style in other distroes), probably the best system admin tool (mandrake control center) even compared to YAST, fast and reliable package management, stability. For new users I’d recommend it over any other distribution.
True, but Mandriva did lose a lot of customers when they were Mandrake. I remember for several years they released distributions that were absolutely horrid when it came to testing; linux kernel compiled with some of the most beta and alpha quality drivers whilst boasting at the same time the largest hardware support (ignoring the reliability issues that came as a result).
I understand that alot of things have changed since but the reality is that it takes a lot of work to bring customers through the door but it only takes a couple of stupid poor quality releases to drive those said customers to the competition.
The Mandrake days are long gone, since then Mandriva released really solid versions starting with 2007.0 but continued to hurt themselves with bad business decisions. But if you take into account just the software, Mandriva is one of the best if not the best Linux distro.
So true! My foray into linuxland began with Red Hat 7.3, because at the time of it’s release it had KDE 3.0 versus KDE 2.2 in the then current Mandrake (8.2 I believe). Then I switched to Mandrake when they came out with their new release, and all was good. Stable, fast, well supported, with up to date packages thanks to Texstar (now running PCLinuxOs). But soon, if I remember correctly, with the version called Bamboo, things started to go downward, one bad release after another. Ended up with FreeBSD for a couple of years. Still love, but I no longer have a desktop PC, and for laptops, linux is more suitable. That, and the fact that I no longer wish to spend as much time thinkering with the system as I used to led me to search for a convenient linux distro. Still looking.
Mandrake would be absolutely perfect. It has the tools, has the stability, but for impatient guys like me (but hey, KDE development moves at such an amazing speed) updates are a bit on the slow side. Not too slow, mind you, waiting for a month or two is by no means too much, but still… And I almost reinstalled it after a day with Fedora, pulling out hair while trying to configure it properly. Couldn’t run my printer (very common el cheapo HP LaserJet 1006P) because of a security warning from SeLinux. Tried through hplip that added a new printer each time I tried a different config, but I was unable to remove the old ones from the printer setting. Running the printer config as root didn’t work (expected), so finally the solution was to run it via kdesu. And the ultimate solution was to disable selinux for good (leaving me a sytem secure enough for desktop use thank you very much). Disabling selinux involved editing a config file manually of course… This whole process is a ‘do it once’ venture, so it’s OK for me. Updates seems to be well tested and stable despite being pretty current, but that’s the only advantage it has over Mandriva, and Mandriva has everything else (my printer worked out of the box without hplip on Mandriva).
“Disabling selinux involved editing a config file manually of course’
system-config-selinux , start / system / administration / SELinux management .
I use Mandriva and love it. It’s stable, fast, the administration tools are pretty good and so on. I have tried quite a few other distros but haven’t liked any other so much. Oh, and I use GNOME, not KDE.
Hi
I am one of those few. I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva in laptops for almost 10 years now. In the early days only Mandrake included the drivers needed to make linux work in a laptop and was friendly enough to work and play. With time, the kernel became stable and so the distribution which finally catchup with Mandriva. I had flirts with Fedora and OpenSUSE and I almost fall in love with OpenSuSE, but I always return to Mandriva. About Ubuntu, I am unimpressed. I still don’t know why so much fuzz about a that orange desktop. For me, Mandriva PWP + PLF rules !!!!
Saludos
JARCH
Is news that slow today the only thing of interest is the announcement of alpha quality software?
21 October is just a day before Windows7 Final launch, right? Not a good timing for Mandriva team.
Au contraire mon cher, it’s rather a bad timing for Windows 7
I don’t know, Mr. Vlad Tepes (I was to Dracula’s Castle two days ago), I wish you were right
I’m running 2009 Spring on my Eee 701 specifically because they have out-of-the-box hardware support. I’ve had various stability problems with it – most recently stemming from the fact that the KDE4 install I decided to drop on is too heavyweight for the 512MB memory I’ve got once you factor in Mandriva’s memory-hungry management tools. I’ve been trying to mitigate this, with perhaps some success, by running the compcache kernel module.
It’s a nice distro, the KDE packages seem very good, it looks good, the management tools are sane. The only arguable problem is that they perhaps don’t have as many packages available – and the last release I regularly used didn’t have a nethack package :-O