Submitted by “Mandriva Linux 2006, released last month, feels very much like a natural evolution of earlier Mandrake releases – in both good and bad ways. As I tested the PowerPack edition, I was disappointed to find many of the same rough edges that drove me away from Mandrake still present in this new incarnation.”
I upgraded first from 10.2 to 2005, then to 2006. Worked fine with absolutely no problems. urpmi (aka the drak package manager) works just fine. OO 1.5 is fine, but it put in a late beta of 2.0 also. Lyx came as standard, which was nice. Otherwise, everything just worked.
And this is after what you are supposed not to be able to do, upgrading in place. I felt the whole thing was very similar to doing Mac upgrades in the old days. Fairly quick, quite painless, the result unremarkable, and all your settings preserved. Printer worked before, it still did. Like the rest. USB disk support flawless. Why, on Suse, does it think empty pen drives are full, and then when you create a folder in them, suddenly you can put files in that folder? Nuts. Media burning flawless. Why, on Suse, does CDrecord suddenly vanish from view of the system, despite being there and with the right permissions?
Mandriva to me is the simplest and best of the non-appliance distros. If you want an appliance type distro, Ubuntu, Mepis, Desktop BSD, PC Linux, PC BSE may be better. If you want speed, slackware with XFCE may be better. But if you’ve a reasonably fast machine, a biggish disk, and you want a couple of development environments and a large choice of packages to just install, Mandriva is great. Its true, its not as easy to keep current as Debian based systems, but it is good enough.
Yast is fine too, but it will have you going around in circles trying to resolve dependencies. Try installing something as simple as LaTex into 9.3. Or the current version of Sylpheed. Crazy stuff, pencil and paper and endless trial and error. And upgrading, while it works more or less, is not at all foolproof.
I upgraded over the net. Took a few hours, and everything was fine. On another machine I used the free DVD. Just went in and ran.
What makes a distro an appliance or a non-appliance distro? Of the appliance distros you mentioned I’ve only used Mepis and Ubuntu so I can really only speak about them. I wouldn’t charactrize either as appliance like. An appliance has extremely limited flexibility. It is designed to support a specific set of functions which can be accomplished in a according to a specific fashion. Tivo is an appliance Linux, Smoothwall is an appliance Linux, Debian desktop derivatives are not. And I don’t think you can really make the distinction on the basis of the breadth and depth of software installed by default either. Or is Debian’s net installer an appliance?
You’re right, you can do anything you want starting with Mepis or Ubuntu – or PCL for that matter. I just meant, they are not like Mandriva in how they install out of the box. They all typically install with one app per function. They are, or they can be if you leave them this way, a bit like one of those packaged systems that come from the stores – Windows, a Works package, maybe Word, PSP and a CD burner.
If you put one of them in for someone, you’ll never be asked, why do I have all these different text editors, word processors, web browsers, email clients, and what do they all do? Whereas of course Mandriva comes on three or four CDs or a DVD, and it has all this stuff. I would put Vector Soho in the same category, and its another which is very worth considering for someone who just wants home-office-internet functionality. And then in BSD you have PCBSD and Desktop BSD, which I’ve installed enough to find promising, but not used for any period.
Don’t mean to knock them at all. They are really a valuable addition to what’s available for Linux. But they are a bit different.
My feeling about Mandriva remains: you cannot tell about a distro without using it for quite a long time, and having done this with M, I’ve been very pleased, and if you want all the stuff on an easy install, its to be strongly recommended. Otherwise, yes, PCL seems like a good choice.
Installer problems (which are very hw related) and foreign english apart, I think this review has hit the nail completely.
Mandrake is a good distro but it’s full of little and no so little quirks in the distro tools.
For example: why in the world does a distro that by DEFAULT ships KDE develop its tools in GTK??
And while these tools greatly help newbies in configuring their system, there are tons of usability issues (printdrake asks you too much things for example), there are windows too much small by default, cutting some text and lots of thing that make you think Mandriva isn’t putting the right amount of attention to detail, as author states.
I have been a long term Mandriva and you are right that its a good distro but for some reason they can never fix the little flaws. With each release I keep hoping that it will get better, but this never happens.
I am not sure if its right to class Mandriva as a KDE centric distro these days because they are crippling KDE more and more with pointless customisation whilst GNOME seems to be getting better support and most all Mandriva tools are gtk based and require some gnome libraries for them to work.
I meant long term Mandriva user in the first line of my post.
“why in the world does a distro that by DEFAULT ships KDE develop its tools in GTK??”
Because when we started writing them the perl QT bindings sucked. Since we use a unified widget theme by default, porting them all to QT now would be a lot of work for very little return. So we don’t do it.
No flame war against KDE, but the decision you took at the time, and knowing that Mandrake is KDE-centric, shows that GNOME is more stable: when it offers a service, it works. Even if it offers less services than KDE…
“No flame war against KDE, but the decision you took at the time, and knowing that Mandrake is KDE-centric, shows that GNOME is more stable”
And you came to this conclusion based based off on one toolkit binding?
Don’t say you’re not flaming, I don’t believe you for a second.
The new generation of System Tools is developed with a Python Backend, they are free software so it should be possible for you to make a kde or qt or wxwidgets front end.
I arrived on the Linux scene around the release of the AMD Athlon XP 3200+, which I built a system around. I fought constant lockups and crashes with the Community Mandrake and thought that maybe Linux wasn’t that polished as I heard. I even bought a year club membership and got a “real” version. Same problems.
In frustration, I tried SuSE on the advice of a (go figure) German friend and found no problems at all with crashes or lock-ups. I have since used SuSE and Ubuntu on both my home and work systems respectively. It just seems to me that Mandrake is not as polished. I enjoy Ubuntu for its understated elegance from Gnome while the tweaker in my likes to fiddle with the KDE beauty.
Linspire apparently remains the only Linux distribution to handle most forms of streaming video right out of the box.
Err,SuSE 10 retail allso plays streaming videos “out of the box” with realplayer.
Ummmm…. Mandrake, Mandriva, whatever. They continue to update their distribution with inadequate testing.
That’s why I like PCLinuxOS – the highly polished, easy to use, easy to update distro that Mandriva should be.
Its probably fine (haven’t used it for work over a longish period) but it is very different. It’s an appliance. It looks excellent for the ordinary user. Mepis is a bit similar, Debian based, and I think the two packaged BSDs are also very promising.
I would probably put in PCL now for an ordinary user, ahead of anything else.
Its not what Mandriva is trying to be. Mandriva is a bit, you want everything and the kitchen sink, and all configurable. Don’t know about KDE on the latest version. I used to use KDE on earlier ones and found it fine, but have switched to Gnome or Windowmaker recently.
Yeah, for english speaking but dont forget that
Mandrake is availlable out of the box for a multi-
ple of language !!!
I like Jason Brooks’ articles. He writes well, and is a good Linux advocate.
However, I believe that he has fallen into the Linux chic trend to bag on Mandrake/Mandriva.
Here’s why:
“Searching for the module you need is a needlessly wordy exercise. Some modules cry out to be combined: Why should “Set up a new network interface,” “Reconfigure a network interface,” and “Delete a network interface” be separate parts of the same tool? How about a friendly module that just deals with network interfaces?”
Yet he sings the praises of Fedora elsewhere in the article, which has separate GUI config tools scattered all over the place, not nearly as centralized as Mandriva Control Center. Also, he sings the praises of Ubuntu, which does not have near the GUI config tools as Mandriva. This is very contradictory, hypocritical, and an indication that he wants to not like Mandriva.
Also …
“A different entry point to Rpmdrake (“Look at installed software and uninstall software packages”) can be used to hose the 1.1.5 packages. But the less said about Rpmdrake, the better. It made me yearn painfully for Synaptic, Ubuntu’s package manager.”
Yes, Debian’s (not Ubuntu’s exclusively, well also Fedoras and PCLinuxOS’s) Synaptic is a very nice tool. Mandriva’s RPMDrake is also a great tool. Even people who bag on Mandriva typically recognize that RPMDrake is a great tool. I’ve used it extensively, and in my experience it has been at least as good as Synaptic.
Also …
[i]”It finally told me that I was through and could press “Return” to reboot into Mandriva Linux. (Return? Every PC keyboard I’ve ever seen has an Enter key, not a Return key.)”
Is he serious? Now is that a nit-picky thing or what? Everyone and their brother knows that the Return key means the Enter key. Frankly, this comment is a perfect example of grasping at straws, and a definite indicater that the reviewer was trying really hard to find something to bitch about.
Now, Jason Brooks, and anyone else, is free to like or not like Mandriva, and prop up the distro of their choice. But this Mandriva bitching is getting really old. Let’s just be fair to all of Mandriva’s strengths and weaknesses.
Yes, Mandriva is not perfect. But for me, it’s much closer to perfectly meeting my linux distro needs than most other distros, including both Fedora and Ubuntu. For me, Fedora has been too bloated and buggy, and Ubuntu has had bad hardware detection and too few nice features. But that’s just me.
“It finally told me that I was through and could press “Return” to reboot into Mandriva Linux. (Return? Every PC keyboard I’ve ever seen has an Enter key, not a Return key.)”
“Is he serious? Now is that a nit-picky thing or what? Everyone and their brother knows that the Return key means the Enter key. Frankly, this comment is a perfect example of grasping at straws, and a definite indicater that the reviewer was trying really hard to find something to bitch about.”
I don’t think he is being nitpicky because it proves the point that they are not paying attention to detail. Yes, of course, most of us know that the Return Key and Enter Key are the same but that does not matter. Most keyboards on PC’s (at least English language) have Enter keys. It is a “small” oversight but a lot of times it is the attention to detail and the effort put into making it a cohesive product that makes the difference.
The large key at the right hand side of the main key area is, technically speaking, the ‘return’ key. The smaller key at the bottom right of the keypad area is the ‘enter’ key. These days they almost always do the same thing (and the ‘return’ key is incorrectly labelled ‘enter’ on some modern keyboards), but historically they did actually have different functions, sometimes. (Run xev and you’ll see they have different keycodes). Most people use the ‘return’ key more than the ‘enter’ key, since it’s closer to the main typing area, so I would actually argue that saying ‘return’ is more correct than ‘enter’.
I agree. The return key mapped to the typewriter return key and a long time ago, did have different a different function (especially in mainframes where editors and special apps mapped to the keypad for shortcuts).
“I don’t think he is being nitpicky because it proves the point that they are not paying attention to detail. Yes, of course, most of us know that the Return Key and Enter Key are the same but that does not matter. Most keyboards on PC’s (at least English language)”
———–
My keyboard says return. Not enter. Since there is obviously no rule about this, I’d say he’s being nitpicky.
Ha, ha, ha, in Spain we call it three ways:
Enter, Return and Intro, and none of this words appear on the very key of the keyboard. Which one should they use?
Do you all think Linux is used by proper computers english spokenlanguage people?
In older versions of MsWindows, they use to right in the spanish version: “reinicializar” (reinitialize), a word they just invented in spanish. after windows XP, I think they have corrected to “reiniciar” (reinitiate), but people still say: <<I have to “reinicializar” windows all the time>>
Return is more in the line of typying machines, something people usually understand, cause is the carriage return key. Is the carriage return key for wordprocessors and writting. The variation to Intro or Enter comes from developing and CLI commands, cause you introduce commands to the terminal.
Don’t be so picky about words you understand.
However, I believe that he has fallen into the Linux chic trend to bag on Mandrake/Mandriva.
Yep, the reviewer does seem to have succumed to that unfortunate anti-Mandriva “trend”… – he’s clearly determined to overstate Mandriva’s supposed short-comings, understate it’s strength’s relative to comparable features in comparable distros, whilst simultaneous under-stating the plethora of problems inherent in Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE etc…. It’s rather silly to be nitpicking Mandriva’s installer (which any reasonable mind would concede is both highly effective and polished relative to the vast majority of desktop distro’s installer’s) whilst ignoring “”Ubuntu’s”” comparable offering…
For an alternate review of Mandriva 2006, check out Mad Penguin’s assesment:
http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=5600
“For an alternate review of Mandriva 2006, check out Mad Penguin’s assesment”
Even though that’s mostly a pro-Mandriva glowing review, it still pointed out short-comings, like KDE performance. Thus it was honest and fair.
Jason Brooks’ review, by cotrast, was not honest and fair. As you said, it minimized Mandriva’s strengths, while making a big deal about it’s weaknesses.
“It’s rather silly to be nitpicking Mandriva’s installer (which any reasonable mind would concede is both highly effective and polished relative to the vast majority of desktop distro’s installer’s) whilst ignoring “”Ubuntu’s”” comparable offering…
“
Bingo.
For me, Mandriva’s installer is by far the best Linux installer I’ve ever used (indcluding Fedora’s Anaconda, the Mepis installer, Debian and Ubuntu’s, the Kanotix installer, etc).
Also for me, Mandriva’s Mandriva Control Center is by far the best I’ve ever used in that category.
And I think RPMDrake is as good as Synaptic, if not better.
I have also found Mandriva to be light and fast, relative to it’s rich features. My experience with Fedora and SuSE, which are comparable in features, was that they were fairly bulky and resource hungry.
And I have found the Mandrake Galaxy theme to be my favorite in the Linux desktop world. It’s both clean and beautiful, IMHO.
[i]Bingo.
For me, Mandriva’s installer is by far the best Linux installer I’ve ever used (indcluding Fedora’s Anaconda, the Mepis installer, Debian and Ubuntu’s, the Kanotix installer, etc).
Also for me, Mandriva’s Mandriva Control Center is by far the best I’ve ever used in that category.[i]
Yep, agreed – relative to the vast majority of desktop distro’s out there, Mandriva clearly produces one of the most effective and comprehensive installers and Control centre/system configuration utilites. What I find rather silly about some of these “anti-Mandriva” reviews is the subtle implication that Mandriva’s hopelessly full of bugs/quirks/problems/issues and somehow other distros such as Gentoo or Ubuntu or Slackware or Debian or Fedora etc, etc [i]aren’t[i] (which is utter nonsense of course)…..every distro has it’s quirks and issues, strengths and weaknesses.
Using the Ubuntu installer is extremely easy. I don’t see the need for a gui when simple interface would work just as well. Press enter here and there and it installs just fine. Ubuntu’s installer is just fine and simple.
Yet he sings the praises of Fedora elsewhere in the article, which has separate GUI config tools scattered all over the place, not nearly as centralized as Mandriva Control Center. Also, he sings the praises of Ubuntu, which does not have near the GUI config tools as Mandriva. This is very contradictory, hypocritical, and an indication that he wants to not like Mandriva.
If I need to do something, I’ll usually look for a GUI config tool first, but if there’s none I’ll happily dive into whatever text config files I need to. Tools that are supposed to make things easier but really waste my time because of a confusing, non-intuitive interface are incredibly irritating.
I can’t speak to this particular example, but I can see where the author is coming from if he finds the GUI controls badly designed.
I have a Mandriva on my Turion64 laptop. It simply works where I was not able to install completelly the others (SUSE, Kubuntu, etc.). The only thing I think he is right, is in the little details which are an old problem. However, if the draktools are not as beautifull as Yast, they are in my sense a bit better (speed, standard fs aware, dependances). The worst package experience I’ve lived through to tell about is with the tools from Fedora/RH.
everything is groovy. mandriva is just fine. installed it at the wireless point here months ago.
javajazz
I am sick and tired of all those reviews.
Why not look at developing a good hal and d-bus frontend that is suitable for all DE:s instead of throwing time on this? NetworkManager for example is a gnome applet – why in the world not make this a freedesktop standard thingy.
Im sick and tired of this – all I want in the end is to choose what DE to use. Changing a DE should not affect on hal and dbus frontend.
Making an central way to store data and get – An OSS variant of WinFS is good. Query your data, query your contact,file,e-mail – they are all objects.
The data should come to me..
Beagle and Kat etc – Why in the world not creating something that fits everything. Instead of the *toolkit* syndrome..
Why the old way of bash init scripts?! Why not launch a daemon in the background that have threads that are launching programs and settings – show that UI directly. If X11 has some serious problems, a gui in ncurses to debug and consider good settings should be a fine way.
FreeBSD have one goal for example – Gnu/Linux has many.
Why not standardize one – and call it Gnu/Linux – nor Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva etc…
Be aware that those things I do say, is aimed on a “desktop” gnu/linux system. If someone found that booring, and likes to have a non-standard system – who likes to play, not just works(tm) – go ahead grab your distro.
Buut the distros who are aiming on the desktop – they should move to a standard.
Gnu/Linux is the users operatingsystem, Microsoft Windows is the Microsoft’s operatingsystem – don’t forget that – in the end the user can change.
“Standardizing” tends to remove the element of choice, which is the whole point of all this.
If you want to be locked into standards, you know where to go.
You still got the choice.
You have the sourcecode. Microsoft do not use standards ,they do for example not support w3c – the list can be long.
Think of recept, if you have a standard from the beginning – you can change it after also.
Same here.
Mandrake has a good installer,and a has good eye appeal,but that is where it ends.If mandrake was a car,it would most likely be a purple and blue Edsel,with snap-on spinners,and join my club bumper stickers.
which is why i don’t bother with distros. i take their kernel, their packagers, and then run my own software on the, stuff their bloated DEs and the magic mount dameons and their desktop search processes …
i dont know why, but for some reason mandriva, desktop/lx and others really rub me the wrong way.
they dont seem like linux. so i use redhat, suse, slackware & ubuntu.
My experience also has been that Mandriva retains good usability over the long haul. I haven’t had that experience with PCL – it seems nice but then some updates will mess it up.
My own experience is to make Mandriva installable livecd’s with mklivecd, shape them the way I want and then install. It is easy to have either the current stable repositories or change to cooker for up-to-date packages, when all is the way I want I run mklivecd and burn iso. It is magic and I’m not sure why others are not on to this.
My own experience is to make Mandriva installable livecd’s with mklivecd, shape them the way I want and then install. It is easy to have either the current stable repositories or change to cooker for up-to-date packages, when all is the way I want I run mklivecd and burn iso. It is magic and I’m not sure why others are not on to this.
Yep, agreed – and similarly, Mandriva makes an excellent “minimal” custom install – I’ve got a Mandriva system that only took up around 500 mb on install – that consisted of Fluxbox, Eterm, Firefox, VIM, NEdit Drakconf and relatively little else (in terms of well known apps) – Mandriva can be as cool/minimal/”technical” as the user wants – the package selection section of the Mandriva install makes it very easy to create your own fine-tuned and tailored OS setup – well worth exploring.
is a fully functional way of adding updated packages coming from the community, like backports.org for Debian.
With a Mandriva, everything works and I have a lot of tools to be able to configure everything I want (install drakwizard, and you will have your samba wizard).
urpmi can be configured to work with any media, not just official ones. There are several third party urpmi media for MDV, for e.g. Hawkwind’s at http://www.seerofsouls.com .
I remember when i tried Mandrake a few years ago. I think it was 10.1 or the late 9.x versions. After a clean install, installing a RPM through the Control Center would corrupt the “start menu” (Not sure what to call it. 2006 calls it “k menu”). The only way to prevent losing the start menu was to install a bug fix RPM BEFORE installing the other RPMs.
Currently on 2006, I can’t get smb4k to find any network shares. I was playing around on another computer running 2006 and lost all the applications from the start menu. Clickong on “Home” turns up a window asking me which program I want to use to run it, and the program list was empty. The only way to navigate was to use the Run command and type on Konqueoror or MMC for the control center.
Uninstalled and reinstalled KDE multiple times (alternating between MMC and Synaptic). Got KDE back and smb4k also magically worked. Still can’t get smb4k to work on my own computer…
I was thinking about starting my membership in the club again but 2006 was a huge turnoff (the video is very buggy). I am thinking about heading off to Ubuntu or Debian.
Yes, I know this one. But I would like it more generalized, like PLF. At least, easyurpmi should work with it.
The reviewers bias and anti-Mandriva chip on his shoulder aside – I’ve got to say that I’ve very much been a big time “distro” explorer, always downloading RPM distro that, Debian derivative that, live CD this, big multi CD distro that.
I’ve tried:
RH 7.3, RH 9.0, Fedora 2, Fedora 4
Mandrake 10 Power Pack, Mandriva 2005 Limited
Mepis 2003, ProMepis, SimplyMepis 3.3.1
Ubuntu Warty, Hoary, Breezy
Debian Sarge
Knoppix 3.3, 3.4, 3.8, 3.9, 4.0
Kanotix 2005.2, 2005.3
PCLinuxOS .91 and .92
Linspire 4.5
Slax, Snappix, FreeSbie, PCBSD, Damn Small, and Puppy
(I’ve probably forgotten a distro or two).
Through all of this, Mandrake/Mandriva has met my needs the best, has delivered the best overall satisfaction, the best features, the best software selection, among the best speed, among the best stability, the best installer, the best GUI config tools, (tied with Synaptic) the best GUI package manager, the best integration, the best support for both KDE and Gnome (which I like more or less equally) and the best look and feel (by far).
I always keep coming back to Mandrake/Mandriva, even though my curiosity compels me to try others.
Quite frankly, Mandrake/Mandriva is the first ditro I always recomend for both newbies and power users alike (as well as geeks and professional who appreciate the polish, features, and attention to detail Mandriva offers).
How can you not have tried Suse? It’s like Mandrake, done even better.
Edited 2005-12-11 20:05