LWN features an article on how SuSE is now a big force in Linux with new products every so often while MandrakeSoft is in deep lethargy media and PR-wise. Note that SuSE made it big also because of help from its own country, Germany (and the rest of Europe), while MandrakeSoft failed to captivate France in the government level and land big contracts that would keep the company in a healthy state.
On SuSE’s Dramatic Rise and Mandrake’s Uninspiring Lethargy
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Mandrake 9.1 is great (Second only to Gentoo), as the article points out, they do lack marketing. But one downside of MDk is their rush to include the latest. 2.4.21 beta Kernel in 9.1 being a example.
Mandrake may not be making the headlines as of late
but they are doing some wonderful stuff at the
club. hopefully once the bankruptcy is over we will
come out fighting. dont count us out yet.
Mandrake 9.1 is great
Mandrake 9.1 is good but not that great. I have a DVD set.
They should now worry about stability instead of bleeding edge script like the anti-alias fonts that you can not turn off. (I really don’t like anti-alias fonts ! Maybe one can turn those off on MDK 9.1 but that’s a tweak that I am far from starting, being lazy as I am).
SuSE is a stable and modern Linux. I think it offers moore than RedHat; speciallly for the price of RedHat official software CDs. It’s good to have a SuSE green against the Red RedHat hype, for counter-balancing.
Linux is being spoken on the EU Parliament. German Parliament too. And they mean it. In my country (Portugal) Bill Gates had a chat with the former Prime-Minister and screw Linux evangelists, he made discounts for the Goverment and Judicial Court Houses.
Side Note: B. Gates even landed on a helicopter at the city center of Lisbon in a place where it was not allowed such landing instead of using the Hospital lanading area near by, he got clearance, however
no, Mandrakei is quite spectacular. u use suse and that
is good for u. stability is excellent. i havent had a single
crash of my 9.1 system since i have installed it. cant
imagine why anybody would want to turn off antialiast
fonts but im sure it can be done
I must say that mandrake 9.1 is the best system for me. I am a student, and the Canadian dollar is favourable in terms of buying a system. Yes, I’m a freeloader (That will change one day) and I must say that Mandrake’s commitment to us freeloaders is the reason for their user base.
Mandrake may not be making the news, but I bet that a large chunk of linux users use it. (Some may even be everyday people).
There may be more stable distros than Mandrake, but it sure has hack beats Windows!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry…but the Mandrake install just sucks compared to SuSE and as far as the daya to day running of Mandrake 9.1 goes, it is just “ho hum.” I am not really seeing any dramatic strides by Mandrake to push any really new conveniences…SuSE 8.2 does…and even more so RH 9 using XD 2.
Mandrake’s installer is my favorite, but other than that it just doesn’t compare with SuSE 8.2. SuSE 8.2 is simply the best linux I have tried (and that’s all the biggies)
While they both have many similar features preinstalled and ready to rock, SuSE is WAAAAAAAAAAY more stable.
Mind you, this is the first SuSE release I have actually liked. 8 and 8.1 were very unstable and quirky for me. My favorite Mandrake was 8.1, with Aurora on boot. Aurora was the nicest looking boot sequence in computing. I wish someone would take that code, tweak it, and reimplement it in other distros….
Mandrake 9.1 is a good product, and even potentially a great product, but it was packaged way too carelesslessly. Some of the mistakes would be laughable if they weren’t so annoyingly unprofessional. But they are on to a good thing. Once they fix these, and I am sure they will in the next release, they would have what’s possibly the best linux desktop out there.
Would that alone get them anywhere? Not at all. As the article says, their salespeople need to go out there and justify their salary. As far as we can tell, they haven’t done sh*t so far. I hope that changes soon enough.
Does Mandrake have salespeople?
I run Mandrake 9.1 and pretty happy. There are many usability bugs and annoyances that could be fixed easily but they just are not ever fixed. The updates are security related and very small bugs – never a real overhaul or update to the tools or system. Instead of releasing a big version like 9.1 and then doing nothing to improve it and just start working on the next version, they need to keep fixing bugs, expanding the configuration tools, etc. For example the ‘configuration wizards’ for the ftp server and such as laughable. all they do is ask if you want to enable for internet and/or intranet. you say ‘yes’, and it exits. great. Lots of things like this where they have tools but don’t continually improve them to make them useful. Most of them are good ideas implemented halfway.
So I’ll keep using it but try some other distros and hope that Mandrake becomes more active in terms of releasing REAL updates.
Mandrake 7.2 was the first Linux distro I installed that detected all my hardware correctly and worked right out of the box. Before that I had tried Redhat (could never get sound or ethernet to work), Corel (never got past the reboot after installation, would always die on me) and Suse (never had sound or a resolution better than 800 x 600). So I stuck with Mandrake through 8.0, 8.1, and 9.1. (no 9.0, I took some time off from Linux for a while). Unfortunately, I only use Linux on my laptop, my desktop at home runs Win2K and I use tools like Photoshop, Bryce, Cinema 4D XL, etc that aren’t available on Linux, nor are there any good alternatives. Mandrake 9.1 always freezes on my laptop after a couple hours of use. I have to do a hard reboot, can’t even escape my X session. So, I’ve moved on to Red Hat 9.0, which works fine. Hopefully they can stick around, may give a future release a try.
-js
i would make suse 8.2 my main distro if it hadnt included the pre-release gcc 3.3. with it, i couldnt compile anything like a vanilla kernel. of course, this is because of the stricter compile options with 3.3, but still….imo it would have been better to leave out the pre-release. ive been waiting for the day when they would release an update or at least an older gcc so i can compile aoftware again.
is a pretty kick butt firewall.
you WILL have to spend a little time with it, but once you get the “feel” of it.
I put 3 pci nics in one machine AND used the onboard ethernet.
I have 4 physical zones (1 WAN, 2 LAN, 1 DMZ), and i’m using it for vpn, transparent web proxy, black hole lists(i.e. mail server never gets the connection from offending IPs/subnets), nat/masquerading(pick your term),dhcp server,caching dns,stateful packet(prelude/snort)
blah blah blah.
99% can be done from php web front end. ssh/cli is sometimes needed to fix quirks etc.
Only a few thinks to say:
1) Mandrake 9.1 is really a great product, much more modern than SuSE, very dynamic and very stable. I’m using it on 6 different machines, including two laptops, and I really have no issue with it. On the other hand, I stopped use Red Hat because it was really too unstable (X Window on modern graphic chipsets in particular)
2) The Mandrake Club is really the good thing for the future of their business. SuSE sells box, and sales of Linux box haven’t stop to decrease for 3 years with high-speed Internet access. So it’s clear that besides its restructuration problems, MandrakeSoft clearly has found the best long-term business model for the Linux field.
3) Mandrake is Free Software, not SuSE. This makes all the difference, and that means that while I’m sure that Mandrake Linux will live very long (even if MandrakeSoft was to disapear which doesn’t seem to be the case at all soon), while I don’t know how long can live the proprietary-SuSE backed and saved from bankrupt two years ago by venture capital.
4) SuSE did much noise recently, in particular with vaporware. Much like Lindows actually. For instance, they announced that they will “soon have an OEM agreement with HP”, like if it was the most fabulous news ever heard on earth. Well, maybe you’d be surprised to learn that HP/Compaq sells many PCs with Mandrake Linux 8.2, and since last may with Mandrake 9.1. Maybe MandrakeSoft should do the PR, yes.
5) As for the OSNews comment: “MandrakeSoft failed to captivate France in the government level and land big contracts that would keep the company in a healthy state.” which is outrageously insulting for MandrakeSoft, I’m french, I’m living in France and I can tell you that Mandrake is great hype here: OK Red Hat has big market share in the business area, but Mandrake gained several big markets in the industry, research projects with prestigious partners, government is using Mandrake for many things, it’s the only Linux version with RH that you can find in stores here. And I can’t see any SuSE installed anywhere.
So lack of PR OK, but lack of activity, certainly not. They save money to reach break-even, and closing deals with PR agencies is a great way to save money. But Mandrake is really something for which many people here and elsewhere are very confident and hopefull. Thank you for them.
> As for the OSNews comment: “MandrakeSoft failed to captivate France in the government level and land big contracts that would keep the company in a healthy state.” which is outrageously insulting for MandrakeSoft, I’m french, I’m living in France and I can tell you that Mandrake is great hype here
I am sorry, but it is not insulting at all. It is the _truth_. SuSE is alive and well today not only because of all their businesses, but because the German government has land big contracts with SuSE. SuSE owes a lot to Munich and other cities that have converted to SuSE.
MandrakeSoft has done nothing of this magnitude with the French government to put Mandrake at schools or at governement offices. The fact that it has “hype” among the Linux fanboys, doesn’t mean that your governemnt buys that hype.
And yes, I am married to a French man.
“which is outrageously insulting for MandrakeSoft, I’m french, I’m living in France and I can tell you that Mandrake is great hype here: OK Red Hat ”
Hey I’m french myself, and this is ONLY YOUR OPINION. The Mandrake success you’re talking about is only, and ONLY a craze amongst the very small geeky community, and a very isolated and small governements applications. Not a society thing. Not a government thing.
Outrageously insulting ? Mais de quoi tu parle ?
“3) Mandrake is Free Software, not SuSE.”
Get your facts straight. In this forum alone it has been mentioned 1000 times that you can have SuSE free as well. I mirrored the 8.2 Pro branch to my backup system, for example. But you can burn someones CDs as well if you don’t have the pipe for that.
> ive been waiting for the day when they would release an update or at least an older gcc so i
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/gcc/8.2 has gcc 3.3 rpms – but don’t expect them to appear in YOU.
> MandrakeSoft has done nothing of this magnitude with the French government to put Mandrake at schools or at governement offices.
I can tell you MandrakeSoft is here at many places in governement offices, army and so on. These last months, they also started to get big financing from French governement agencies for research activities (see http://clic.mandrakesoft.com), and also fro Europe (see http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/openrouter.php3), and I heard from a new “big” research deal they won recently for research in the simulation area, civil nuclear activities (at CEA), along with partners such as Thales.
> And yes, I am married to a French man.
And so? Do you live here?
My overall point is that lack of PR is absolutely not lack of activity, and that this negative stuff you’d like to show about Mandrake smells just like FUD.
> Get your facts straight. In this forum alone it has been
> mentioned 1000 times that you can have SuSE free as well.
Stop that please. Free Software doesn’t mean only free as beer.
>And so? Do you live here?
Not yet. But we will, in 2 years.
> My overall point is that lack of PR is absolutely not lack of activity
I am sorry, but PR is part of the game. Lose the impressions and you lose the game. It is how it is, no matter what you say.
“Stop that please. Free Software doesn’t mean only free as beer.”
Are you implying that all Linux-users only wait to grab a distribution and then modify it to their likings day + night? Who is at all capable of that? The only thing not free I am aware of is YAST (?) — so this is real BS you are saying. I think you are not getting over it that your little pet (Mandrake) is not getting the recognition it deserves in your opinion – but that’s not SuSE’s fault, it’s Mandrake’s fault. I follow up what people say about the major distros since rev 6-7 and I cannot remember when people have NOT been complaning that Mandrake doesn’t ever get its act together bug-wise… they manouvered themselves in there.
but the Mandrake install just sucks compared to SuSE
I have my opinion about Mandrake, it is good. But when installers are in order Mandrake has the best installer on the market at this date. No doubt about it ! It (the installer) really outshines !
(I bought the Mandrake Server CD set (no support) to help Mandrake and have a IBM DB2 database evaluation cd. It good as I said already, but not great.)
You may be able to legally get it for zero dollars (minus YAST if you do the cumbersome FTP install), but it is not “free” as in “all-GPL”, and it is not allowed by the EULA to make copies of the CDs you bought and redistribute the ISOs, because there are parts of the boxed CD distro (YAST installer and some “artwork”) that are proprietary. You would have to do some reverse-engineering first if you wanted to redistribute SuSE.
That’s why I’ll stick with Mandrake for the time being, and put up with the one or two annoying usability quirks, like how the mouse pointer becomes a busy hourglass and stays that way if you boot into KDE with desktop icons disabled. I hate that because it makes it look like the system is hanging. KDE on RedHat doesn’t do this, but Lycoris and Mandrake do. Fix this already! It should be embarrassing when RedHat of all distros has taken the time to fix a KDE annoyance that no one else has.
Wow, that is more of a revolution than Linux 😉
btw. I am (half) french myself. And Eugenia, if you are looking for a place to live in France, drop me an email…
Sure it’s not “all-GPL”, there are BSD and X11 licensed programs included too and others.
> it is not allowed by the EULA to make copies of the CDs you bought and redistribute the ISOs
It is – as long you don’t charge money for it.
This is plain wrong, I have the proove in front of my face. Of course you have YAST with the FTP version. And you can copy the CDs, only, you must not *sell* them. There has been a pretty good update on the status of all major distros in one of the latest mags of German C’t magazine where it has been reconfirmed that you can burn the SuSE CDs. Write SuSE a mail and ask them about it if you don’t take it from me.
Mandrake Linux is still more popular as a hobby distro than SuSE. Mandrake also has some quite advanced features like devfs that both SuSE and Redhat don’t yet have (out of the box). However – in the eyes of business people – Mandrake Linux may not seem as credible and consistent enterprise level product as the SuSE & Redhat distros.
Mandrake’s image as mainly a hobby distro may be its weakness from the business point of view. Also the hobby users alone may not bring enough profit to Mandrake?
I think SuSE has always put their main emphasis on meeting the needs of companies and public sector first (e.g. the United Linux effort), though not forgetting the hobby users either. It just seems unclear, what benefits Mandrake could offer for business customers when compared to e.g. SuSE & Redhat?
like Photoshop, Bryce, Cinema 4D XL, etc that aren’t available on Linux, nor are there any good alternatives.
You can learn GIMP and there is a good POVRAY interface in the Mandrake KDE applictions that you might want to compare (with a grain of salt !) to Cinema 4D. It’s called … KPovModller.
http://apps.kde.com/rf/2/latest
(I am biased snce there is Portuguese developer envolved – Mr. Luís Passos de Carvalho)
You might also visit:
http://www.linuxartist.org/3d.php
(Check for Moonlight 3D, my favorite)
Linux apps are very ideosyncratic but they do not come second in *some* points to $5.000 Windows apps. Just a samll help.
SuSE is not completely free software…I agree, Yast has a special license that allows you to make changes (http://www.suse.de/en/private/support/licenses/yast.html) but I can not think of a distro that is a 100% Free Software. Almost any distro comes with X, which has a BSD-style license. Distro’s that come with java whether it be Sun or blackdown….is not Free Software.
I looked at the mandrake webpage and there I saw the Standard mandrake distro:
This pack includes popular applications such as Flash® player, Acrobat Reader® and Real® player as well as NVIDIA® drivers.
The last time I checked, these programmes were not Free software!
I think we’re still in a phase where a big distro company like mandrake and suse can’t live only from free software. The market is still in it’s early stages. For some software like java, there is no alternative that is as good (yes I know they’re working on it).
In time I think we will see more and more Free Software….but it’s an evolution not a revolution.
I have used Mandrake for a while and it is a great distro. One of the main problem is their distribution channels ‘suck’.
We are now middle of June and none of the local computer stores such as Best Buy, Fry’s Electronic, … have any boxed sets of 9.1
When SUSE and RedHat announce a new release it is at all those stores the day they announce it will be available.
Most companies that I work with here go to Fry’s to pick up a box to try out a new product, so if the shelfs are full of SUSE and RedHat then that is what they will pick up. Saturday there was one lonely 9.0 Powerpack box at one of the local Fry’s where the other local store didn’t have a single copy at all (But I picked up a CD pack of Slackware 9.0).
BH
SuSE has offices in CZ,D,IT,UK and US according to their website but none in FR. Buy Mandrake?
Eugenia,
I agree !! Marketin is what made McDonalds or MS successful and not necessarily their products.
Obviously SUSE can sell whereas Mandrake has a problem in that area. MDK might be technically superior to SUSE, but if you don’t know how to persuade people to BUY it, it is of no use.
BTW, i’ve read that a big gun is leaving Madrake in a couple of months ….
First of all, saying that X isn’t free because it’s BSD-like licensed is pretty crazy. BSD _is_ a free license, as much as it can get and in every meaning of the word (including the GNU definition). It’s just unprotected freedom.
Second, this is not about including proprietory third party software like Java or the NVidia drivers. The reason why SuSE is no free software is, that their own installation and configuration tool is _not_ licensed under a free license (wether BSD- or GPL-like). It is still free as in beer and gives you the source, but it’s not free as in Free Software or Open Source (yes people, just because the source is open doesn’t mean it’s Open Source Software, that’s why the term is just as confusing as Free Software).
Wether this is important for you or not or wether you find a million moralic reasons why the YAST license isn’t bad, it doesn’t change the fact that RedHat and Mandrake are completely Open Source, while SuSE is not.
They need to make it atractive and not to just give it away… that is SuSE’s advantage…
If I write a book… and give it away… will you give me money after you read it… no… so I sell it from starters… you just have reviews and coments to gide you…
Linux needs to be more like a product… not that it can’t be free… but those who work to make a product need to be able to get some profits… eider by service or special fetures…
Giving things for free is not going to help them on a market where money is needed… they need cash flow to keep on working on there products… and eat… and survive… stop been like communist… or hunger will be in your daily lives untill you die… not that that is exclusive to coministic things… but you might get my idea…
mandrake’s installer is nicer than yast, but yast is a better overall tool.
earlier someone made the comment that maandrake was more up to date than suse….give yer head a shake dude. SuSE has the newer release with newer versions of the major components.
someone also said the ftp install is “cumbersome”. give yer head a shake too. boot cd…smack enter a few times…enter directory…yast comes up and it’s all rock n roll from there. easy as pie. personally, I downloaded the whole 8.2 directory tree and install from hard disk….couldn’t be easier.
people always like to say that mandrake is so good for newbies…how so? The installer is noce, but the rest of system is too buggy and inconsistent. Mandrake lost focus of what they were trying to do around v8.1. I can’t stand any release after that…well 8.2 was ok i guess.
suse also contributes a ton of stuff back to the community…speciffically to KDE. so yast isn’t GPL…big deal. suck it up or stick with mandrake….SuSe doesn’t need the Mandrake freeloaders to get by….they can be successful using marketing and solid products. mandrake begs people to become part of their little club…and they still can’t be a leader in the feild. So did you club members get a secret decoder ring and shiny plastic wallet card? Mandrake will die soon IMO, because they have no focus due to extremely poor leadership from their mismanagement team.
Is it just me, or is SuSE full of annoying little bugs? Every time I’ve tried it, some new error ruins the experience – the last time it was the bundled version of KDE which refused to let me launch more than one instance of xterm, and then after a while, refused to let me launch even one. Plus, the X-window configuring during installation nearly always hang my machine (this has happened on more than one box!)
Compared to RedHat, it’s woefully buggy – unless 8.2 is radically different.
… after 6.x SuSE isn’t a good distro anymore.
At work I must administrate a SuSE because of support arguments etc. from my chief (but I don’t used any SuSE support yet;-)
No, it’s really not a good distro. If I run into trouble after 2 hours where I can really define it’s a distro based mistake, I delete it.
Only RH8.0 was fine if I compare the big distro companies. RH9.0 is a kernel monster (because of NPTL)…
Mandrake (9.1) is a nice distro if anyone know it’s features, but I don’t learn a distro where I don’t know what happens tommorow with Mandrake…
And what’s the best?
Try Slackware!
Mandrake rulez on the desktop. No questions asked. Been using it for years..
For server, Trustix wins. The two combined make an excellent combo.
If you like Mandrake, would like to keep them going, and can afford it, support them by becoming a MandrakeClub member. I have.
8.2 is a vast improvement over 8.1. I didn’t like 8.1 at all….they got it together with 8.2.
Having used both SuSE and Mandrake, from an install and overall usability/stability standpoint, I would have to say that there is no way I’d go back to Mandrake, unless SuSE began releasing corrupted/broken packages.