“While the Mandriva Linux distribution lost most of its charm when many of the developers left to form Mageia Linux and the remaining stakeholders switched to just doing one official release per year, the 2011 final release was published on Sunday. While Mandriva no longer carries the popularity it did in its early days or back in the Mandrake days, the 2011.0 release is an improvement. Mandriva 2011.0 provides the mandriva Package Manager (a new package manager under heavy development), MandrivaSync (a cloud service for Mandriva that’s similar to DropBox, iCloud, and Ubuntu One), LibreOffice 3.4, and adopts the system service manager.”
Mandrake was number 1 in Distrowatch.com
DistroWatch has a review up of the new Mandriva release. http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110829#feature
It looks like the new team took an ax to this release.
Me, like ALL Mandriva users I know, will use 2010.2 as their last Mandriva release. The fact they purposely made 2011 none upgradable to Mageia, as the last minute, means even they see the writing on the wall – and they are scared.
For me and ALL Mandriva users I know, it will be Mageia or some other desktop orientated release in the future. Regardless, Mandriva is simply no longer an option. They killed themselves.
I just dread looking for a Mandriva alternative. Honestly, historically, no one else even came close and that includes both Debian and Ubuntu. Granted its been roughly a year and a half since I last looked at Ubuntu. Hopefully its matured A LOT, and is now competitive.
lol last time I heard mandriva had become the top linux desktop for a time. now apparently it sucks. oh boy linux desktop pumpernickel
Total, extremely, ignorant FUD and BULLSHIT!
If you look through the archives of mageia-dev (I think I even posted it there, but I gave up posting to their list trying to provide help and advice as the best thing I could hope for beyond being ignored, was being mocked.. so it might’ve been mostly irc), I did repeatedly raise the qquestion about compatibility, offer them help in achieving, with implementations, even doing the implementations etcetc., but I was the pink elephant in the room made persona non grata for simply taking a position based on actual knowledge about what happened.
Change of rpmdb format had nothing to do with mageia, and I provided them with the exact lines of code for doing the conversion/upgrade and helping them out, even doing the work for them.
Both the perl-URPM API (in mandriva) and the stand-alone rpm5 dbconvert.c tool can do the conversion easily and safe back, the pieces of code and work required is trivial and I’ve offered to do it several times, only with a couple of persons showing slight interest on IRC, while the rest ignoring me.
So don’t you dare make up such allegations.
In stead of using Mageia aka Fox News and following their Tea Party Movement, you should actually verify your claims before posting such malicious FUD!
I’m still available as [email protected] and [email protected] for anyone who actually wants information and answers about such things before they make up stuff.
I’m happy to give the technical details and does well at explain things in ways for people who aren’t dogmatized.
And in case you wonder who I am, what my credentials are and my credibility, I point you to http://www.linkedin.com/in/proyvind , the recommendations from the *TRUE* old-timers before edge-it and those still active and well respected in the community should dismiss this continued character assasination attempts and FUD directed against me, my associates and their intended damaging effect.
—
Feeling like a pompous ass for my response and feeling the need to prove myself, but enough is ENOUGH!
Per Øyvind
Oh, and if you actually care about conversion of rpmdb to do the upgrade, here’s the standalone tool: http://rpm5.org/cvs/rlog?f=rpm/tools/dbconvert.c
If you don’t get it to compile, if it needs minor adjustments to work with rpm4 API, you’re allowed to contact me and I’ll fix it in a jiffie for you even if you’d happen to be joseph fritzël or the reanimated corpse of Joseph Mengele.. ;p
So please stop the FUD *NOW* or prove your ignorance by continuing.
I’ll be ready to hearing from you, see you silenced or admit your lies.
Either way, I don’t bear grudges or plan on acting as an ass against someone asking for help or showing humility, but wacking FUD trolls with cold, hard, technical facts I have no issues with.
—
I don’t bite
Per Øyvind
lol That’s quite a sense of humor, you’ve got there.
…for reasons I’ve already mentioned here under another article, as well as the fact that they pretty much force KDE4 onto you now (all others are completely unsupported). Not to mention that all install options are gone, and you’re given something very basic.
Everyone, do yourselves a favor and just use Mageia if you want Mandriva. It’s the next generation of Mandriva; it’s ironically more Mandriva than Mandriva itself since Mandriva 2011.
If you don’t believe it, just try them both yourself.
Edited 2011-08-30 05:07 UTC
Oh, how dare I praise Mageia for sticking to Mandriva’s ideals and slam Mandriva for completely losing their way! Keep up the down-modding, Mandriva fans. It only shows that the company (somehow) still has a few left. Which I’d be surprised if the number could be counted on two hands, honestly.
[Yes, that last bit was purposely sarcastic, if you haven’t figured. But seriously, how many times does does this company have to “almost die” financially before it finally bites the dust? How the hell can they keep afloat and keep fans, especially when they do crazy shit such as what was done in their latest release? Oh well, Ubuntu’s been the same way lately, so I guess some illogical things are just bound to happen… but clearly some people must be wary, because otherwise Mageia would have never formed. FYI, I’m not a Mageia *or* Mandriva user, but it’s clear which distro I think is superior. Just my opinion, of course… but I guess you can keep down-modding me for it, because apparently to Mandriva fans it is invalid.]
Edited 2011-08-30 07:33 UTC
I guess they have a new focus. It would probably alienate a lot of users.
It would be good to have a distribution fully focus on large desktop installations though.
Not supporting choice might not be so bad in such an environment, easier to support and it keeps them focused on what they are trying to accomplish.
I stopped rushing out and trying new versions two years after they bought out Lycoris. Quite frankly the difference from one release to the other was so minor it was wasting my time and money. The latter distribution was beautiful and built for the layman. Mandrake lost it’s roots about that timeframe and just seems to get worse with each revision. If only they had been more like the premise behind Lycoris rather than killing it off.
Edited 2011-08-30 05:24 UTC
And this is exactly why you should be trying this version. The team and management are completely new, so new vision, new direction, new looks! A lot of nice stuff going on at Mandriva now and the community is more important then ever before.
Edited 2011-08-30 06:20 UTC
Did they drop GNOME?
If I understood correctly, I believe this is a smart move. They have had a solid KDE desktop in previous releases. Focusing on their strength is smart. GNOME and XFCE lovers can install one of the other hundreds of distros. I does not make sense to support multiple desktops. Distros should have more focus.
That being said, I am a GNOME user so I may go with Mageia instead. The sad thing is that there is no good distro with a strong GNOME focus. Fedora is too focused on bleeding edge and not stable enough for my taste. Ubuntu f–ked it up with Unity. Debian may be the closest thing to a good GNOME distro but it is too “KISS” as in not as advanced as Mageia or Mandriva.
Edited 2011-08-30 07:44 UTC
Not totally, I think it’s still available but it has clearly been demoted to a second class citizen.
I agree with you: a distribution should focus on only one desktop: it’s hard enough to get one right!
That said, I’m surprised that you didn’t find a good distro with a strong GNOME focus: there are far more distributions which focus on GNOME that there are distributions which focus on KDE, I’d say that there are only two KDE-centric distributions: PCLinuxOS and Mandriva (KUbuntu is not really a main distribution as it’s derived from Ubuntu).
I think Kubuntu does count in this scenario, though I still wouldn’t recommend it personally.
Arch is a very good KDE distro in my opinion, even though it’s not a KDE-exclusive disro; however Chakra is.
Edited 2011-08-30 12:52 UTC
Arch is great (long time user) but sadly, inherently suffers from regressions. Regularly. Which can be OK for geeks like us.
My switch to KDE 4.7.0 brought me a terrible framerate, for instance.
*If* Mandriva 2011 turns out to be a stable (1 year + backports (?) seems perfect) and polished KDE distro (not only upstream KDE but with some innovations & contributions to KDE), it will definitely be very interesting.
Does Mandriva have the staff to maintain a distro properly ? Will give it a try and subscribe if that’s good.
Edited 2011-08-30 14:57 UTC
I honestly don’t know but its been suggested they don’t. In fact, from what I’ve read of Mandriva is their short handed staff IS the reason they’ve so dramatically pruned 2011. I guess the question is, do they have the staff to maintain a dramatically reduced distro. Comments from package maintainers I’ve read strongly suggest this isn’t the case as many have fled to Mageia.
I want to stress I’m not offering fact, just my opinion. As a very long time Mandriva user (dating back to early Mandrake days), I can’t begin to tell you how sad this entire fiasco makes me.
I think the ball is in their yard now, but v.2011 marks the beginning of a new era for Mandriva and I think there are many rough edges to be taken care of. I’d wait for 2011.1 or whatever will be the next version to put my full trust and hope in.
There’s rumour that they do, there’s rumour that they don’t. We will have to wait and see.
RHEL6 & clones deliver a good Gnome, imho.
Actually there are more: Pardus, Chakra, MEPIS, Kanotix, etc.
I thought Mandriva was dead. But now, they seem to do to KDE what Canonical did to GNOME, in a good way : bring some polish & make it simpler. (while, it seems, not repeating some of their mistakes — overcomplicated dash or 1:1 OSX copy anyone ?)
It’s a the same time very Mac-ish (new taskbar, look, minimalistic GUI) and Windows-ish, with many KDE unique features.
Might turn out to be great actually… KDE is great but they need contributions from the distros themselves, too.