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Because then much of that talent could move on to different projects, where it could actually do some good, instead of wasting it on a distribution backed by a company that is like the corporate version of the Titanic? Over the last several years Mandriva's history has mostly been: Sinking, sinking, sinking, sinking, sinking. They get occasional help, but they always continue tanking. They might as well rename themselves Tankdriva.

It's about time Mandriva dies; I've said it many times on DistroWatch's comment's section and probably here too, and I'll say it again: the latest version of Mandriva's distribution is barely even shadow of what it once was, while Mageia truly feels like a spiritual successor of the distribution, a snapshot of when it was still good, but with much more activity.

You like Mandriva's latest? Well then, I can't see why, but you'd be better off just using ROSA Desktop. After all, ROSA helped with Mandriva's latest release to be what it is, and ROSA's distribution is mostly the same. Considering so many Mandriva developers jumped ship to Mageia, and many of the remaining developers later moved to ROSA, Mandriva is dead in the water.

Edited 2012-05-19 05:36 UTC

It is very sad to see it go.

In the good old days, Mandrake used to be one of my favourite distributions, like Ubuntu is for me nowadays.

Its support for Pentium only processors and a pleasant desktop experience, when compared with other distributions, was great.

But then they started going into the wrong direction...

Did it ever make more than negligible difference? (and not necessarily in "desired" direction - including, IIRC, somewhat larger executables ...effectively more hungry for L2, memory bandwidth, and such?)

It sure did back in 1996 with my Pentium 166 MHz tower running with 32 MB, if memory does not fail me.

Oh, it sure did, when it worked. My most prominent memory of Mandrake, however, is version 6.0 where they used pgcc 1.1.3. Seg faults and signal 11s all over the place when there was not a single thing wrong with my hardware, and outdated packages to boot.

I don't know, all the tests I've seen suggested (if memory does not fail me) that such compile-time optimisations usually give negligible gains, at best (and, in very memory & bandwidth constrained situations, sometimes harm - but really, also negligible)

If that was about "feel" ...easy to fall into ~placebo without proper ABX procedures, with such minuscule differences. RAM amount and HDD speed were more responsible for feel also back then.
(and certainly are on my dual PII 266 that I keep around)

Edited 2012-05-27 00:08 UTC

+1 kill Mandriva s.a. - by now I'm sure it has lost most of its customer and the rest are looking to move anyway. Piss poor management, a lot of wasted dev talent and a perfect example on how to shit on your community.

http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/54808-mandriv...

+1 for Rosa! It rocks!

Mandriva reminds me about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_stil...

Because all you are doing is reinventing the wheel over and over and over? The problem with linux is you have too few devs spread over too many projects and it shows. look at the bug trackers for any major distro and see how many bugs are two years old or more...there are a LOT of bugs that old.

It seems each bunch changes just enough to make their work not really relevant to the others and that is just a shame. Imagine how quickly bugs could be fixed if there were only 3 or 4 to work on instead of the hundreds on distrowatch?

In the case of Mandriva its even more pointless as much of the community and devs went with the 2010 fork (Mageia I think?) so all you will end up with is a zombie distro like Xandros, alive in name only but all but dead because everyone has moved on.

Well, while I don't like some of their technical decisions, Fedora has served me well as far as RPM distros are concerned, since I have become fed up with Ubuntu's breakages and weird UI experiments around 2010.