Linuxlookup.com is reporting after spending weeks balancing pros and cons, Mandrakesoft has decided to change its name. The name change will apply worldwide to both the company and its products. Reasoning behind the name change, along with details are available.
Mandrakesoft Announces Name Change: Mandriva
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
– I know, I know !. Let’s kill two well known brands and to well tested products that have two well established audiencies and create a new brand that nobody knows, that has not been tested and that has no audience whatsoever !
– yeah !. I bet that can get us into chapter 11 again =D
– Or even better, I could get us to bankrupcy !
– yeah ! Rock on !!
Thanks god their marketing people weren’t working for wolkswagen ….
Can you picture yourself driving a Wolksvolvo ? A Volvowagen?
I thought it was a joke also but then going to the Mandrakesoft website shows the same bit of news. I mean come on “Mandriva”???
C’mon, this website should have published it on April 1st. It can’t be serious!
mandriva sounds like a crazy “man’sdrivel”
to late for a 1st april fool …
I don’t know for sure, being german and all, but i guess to french ears it might sound good. I think it is horrible, but i will get used to it, like Fedora.
Tuxmachines had some news on 31st march reguarding mandriva, lol what a crappy name!
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/426
Worst … name … ever!
Yes, it is pronounced Evar but it is still spelled Ever which I explained clearly during my door prize acceptance speech at last years Star Wars convention. Now I must hurry back to my comic bookstore, where I dispense the insults rather than absorb them.
The stupidity of who ever thought of this name is mind boggeling. I mean it sounds like something a five year old would come up with. They defently should have tried to come up with something better and different like what Red Hat did with Fedora
Just plain Mandrake was perfect. So now they went from bad to worse. This goes on the list of worst names for a company or product line which includes Lindows and Linspire and Inprise which Borland was smart enough to realize was a horrible name a changed back.
I had actually thought Xandros though was based on connectiva although I understood that they were licensing it rather then having purchased it.
Or wait maybe Xandros is based on another distro from around the same time that connectiva was around.
It will be interesting to see though what they do with connectiva. I understand it had some impressive features.
If there is a name change, someone is going to b!tch about it.
I think Mandriva is fine. It’s simple, logical, and catchy. Hopefully for MandrakeSoft, it will be able to leverage the brand names of Mandrake and Connectiva with this new combination.
Both Mandrake and Connectiva have great features. I’m looking forward to seeing the technological combination. I’ll probably wait for the second release of Mandriva, though, because by that time most of the intitial bugs will worked out.
Dont like the name either.So that means all the system apps like HardDrake going to take a hit ? To what … ???
” It will be interesting to see though what they do with connectiva. I understand it had some impressive features.”
Well, from where I’m standing, they’ve just killed it…
Mandriva .. sounds like ‘trivia” …:p
Xandros is actually based on Corel Linux (back when Corel went Linux-crazy), which is based on Debian.
Mandriva car into the building, ok maybe not. It is a stupid name though.
No it’s not …
And here is why …
” I’ll probably wait for the second release of Mandriva, though, because by that time most of the intitial bugs will worked out.”
Exactly =D
That’s why you just DO NOT simply MERGE products …
Each one has its stablished user base. Non of their users are willing to jeopardize a thing in order to see “how are things coming along until they are all set?”. No corporation is throwing money down the drain just to chek “how good are they now that they’ve merged”…
Philip Morris owns how many tobbacco brands? And why didn’t they merged them all??
Oh yeah, that’s probably because they now how to do the right thing to reach a market, even if what they sell is poison …
After saying “Mandriva” in my head a few times, it sounds like:
“Man dribble” – (you get the gist) not good at all … or
“Man driva” – Like a Man diva, or transvestite.
Unfortunately, I think many people are going to get these images when they here the name “Mandriva”.
This will be like Chevrolet selling the Chevy Nova in Brazil. Nova means “no go” in Portuguese. A big marketing disaster.
I hope MandrakeSoft reads the posts at OSNews and Slashdot, and thus come to their senses. They put out a fine product, but renaming to “Mandriva” could be an absolute marketing disaster.
HardDrake to … hardriva? (ppl from harddrive industry might complain about it)
draktools … drivatools?
rpmdriva?
urpmi … urpmi !!!!
I once saw a documentary on how the name “pentium” was developed. There was and probably still is a company in california that developed names for products and they talked about the psychology of why pentium was selected out of a list of like 50 names. And one of the reasons pentium was so successul besides its not having much of a competitor was its name.
But Mandrake seems to have fallen off the wagon over the past few years and putting the name aside maybe this will help them get a fresh perspective on things.
Then again maybe not. We’ll just have to see.
As far as Xandros being based on Corel Linux, ya i always got that confused with connectiva and to this day i have no idea what the difference between them are although wasnt connectiva based in Mexico or something and Corel of course is in Canada?
I mean, come on. I don’t like telling people what my Linux distro of choice is because of the name. “Ubuntu.” They look at me, “What the ??”
“Sounds like a tranny stripper.”
ROFL!! Oh my god thats hilarious. What an image!!
Oddly thats actually pretty accurate.
re Ubuntu:
I actually like Ubuntu although i cant figure out for the life of me what is the big deal about it and how it compares to anything else out there. I keep thinking it sounds exactly like its the same as Fedora meaning technically but just simply not a part of Red Hat.
I dont though like Kubuntu which apparently like Ubuntu is a real word. Kubuntu doesnt exactly roll of the tongue very well. And even when I think “kubuntu” i feel like stuttering on the K.
For some reason, everytime I hear “Kubuntu”, it sounds like a vulgar english reference to the female genitalia. To see what I mean, just remove the 2nd, 3rd, and last letter.
why wouldn’t they just chop it down to drakesoft. so simple and the naming scheme for pretty much their entire set of tools would still be relevant.
drakesoft is, unfortunately for the late Mandrakesoft, already taken. See drakesoft.by.ru
I hadn’t heard about the liability associated with the Hearst Corp…what’s up with that?
I think Mandriva sucks as a name. If they wanted to honor both companies in the new name, why not “ConnectaDrake”?
Look at this, it’s unbelievable! How could they put such a horrible name??
On the cooker mailing list there was a discussion about this, a week ago (http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/cooker/2005-03/msg07108.php). Everybody said Mandriva was the worst name ever. Some people suggested Mantiva, and many agreed with that name.
The problem is: the people in charge just don’t listen. Where are these people? How do we contact them? They’re not in the cooker mailing list, they probably don’t read osnews or slashdot or anything; on the website it’s hard to find an email for contact – jesus!
The other bad decision is the UI changes in the next Mdk. They’re making awful changes (http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14357 and http://lists.zerezo.com/mandrake-cooker/0611.html) but “nobody” (the people make the decisions) listen.
My 2 cents,
Victor.
Holy sh*t, what a crappy name. Ah well, I’ll get used to it, I hope
Surely they meant to put Con first and man second? conman. It’s catchy, like hot mail.
I like “Mandiva” too, but not Mandriva.
Even in Italian, the word Mandriva sounds badly.
Man – Dree – Vah
Bah!
“This will be like Chevrolet selling the Chevy Nova in Brazil. Nova means “no go” in Portuguese. A big marketing disaster.”
That’s widely reported but it’s not true. Check this:
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
RE: the Herst lawsuit
At one time Mandrake’s Tux logo had a cape and magic wand. Herst owns the rights to the old “Mandrake the Magician” character and they decided that the logo was copyright infringement. Mandrake is better off ditching the name since Herst is determined to be stupid about it.
As far as I can understand… most African languages pronounce the vowel “u” as “oo” as in cool. And since Ubuntu is an ancient African word….
Otherwise I think mandriva is a really useless name and maybe they should seek alternatives.
they had to change their name because they lost trademark battle. Shuld have chosen Mindows – that strategy worked well for Linspire. And mandriva makes Linspire look like a great name!
Such a poxy name. I really cant beleive it. I just need to make my opinion known. I couldnt believe when I got the email,
thank god im not the only one who hates. It sounds so tacky, totally unprofessional. Lets all do the right thing and head for ubuntulinux.org as im about to do.
Man, that name seriously sucks. The marketing department that came up with it should commit seppuku or something similar for dishonoring their profession so.
And if it wasn’t come up with by a marketing department… Well, that explains why it sucks so much.
Mandriva? Sounds like a New Yorker trying to say “man driver”. How creative. As a long time Mandrake user, this is disappointing.
The idea obviously came from french people (no offense meant, I’m french aswell)
In french, it doesn’t sound too bad, and it doesn’t ring any similarity with some other words or combination of words.
It’s amazing that it didn’t seem to have occured to them that it might not sound as good in english.
I hope they’ll listen and change it.
mandconnectiv
or manconnectiv i think would be more appropiate.Next step changing the somewhat childish logo into something more adventurous and professional at the same time.
“I don’t know for sure, being german and all, but i guess to french ears it might sound good. I think it is horrible, but i will get used to it, like Fedora.”
Yeah, but at least “Fedora” is an actual word, AND it is a Hat… in fact, RedHat’s red hat symbol IS a Fedora!
😀
That is an absolutely terrible name. Mandrake has always sounded good. I wonder whether this might have anything to do with that law suite.
in russian it sounds like very vulgar word
.
I don’t know how to explain my friends that I use mandriva
, they will laugh over me.
“”This will be like Chevrolet selling the Chevy Nova in Brazil. Nova means “no go” in Portuguese. A big marketing disaster.”
That’s widely reported but it’s not true. Check this:
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp “
I stand corrected. It’s actually Spanish, and it only loosely translates to “no go”, but not properly. Thanks for the link.
But my point still stands, regardless of whether or not I was refering to an urban legend with the Nova thing. Mandriva is still a horrible name, and can be likened to the Nova myth (anectdote/story to teach marketing, etc) – a marketing disaster.
yeah, except for the fact that we *changed* the damn penguin bootsplash already.
All the drones come out to piss and moan about nothing. Keep on winning. Do you really think that much is going to change?
That way, nobody’ll recognize it, your customers will have to use different names to refer to new and old versions, and the power of your past successes will be diluted.
Oh, wait… I mean “bad idea”…
hey, but on the other hand, maybe everyone will forget about the times we screwed up too!
And it makes me sad to see them choose such an ugly name. Mandrake has always had problems trying to look like a serious commercial distro, and this name is not going to make anything to solve that.
I mean, for me (I’m Spanish) it sound bad. But, when I try to pronounce it in English, it sounds even worse
.
BTW, Justin, I don’t know if anything is going to change, but we can only try. The worse that can happen is that nothing changes…
I truly believe that Mandrake has lost the war. At the moment, all my work servers are using CentOS/RHEL. My home desktop is using Fedora. I am interested in Ubuntu and SuSe. Mandrake used to excite me a few years back but now just seems like it is lacking in stability, technical excellence and doesn’t have any features that differentiate it from the other distro’s.
For the market Mandrake is in, I see the following. Winners: SuSe, RedHat, Ubuntu. Losers: Mandrake. Linux consolidation will continue on. Several professional distro’s will account for 95% of the market, the rest will be occupied by hobby distro’s.
If i had a well known product name, i would’nt change it..
http://bitsofnews.com
I’d love to know how you discover that it’s lacking stability without actually *using* it. Features that differentiate from other distros? How about comprehensive wizards for both workstation and server configuration, wireless network roaming, support for non-standard display resolutions (10.2 / 2005), a huge number of packages (do a wc -l on MDV’s package list, then compare it to Fedora’s…), broad desktop support unmatched by most distros (MDK’s menuing system, for instance, works on KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, fluxbox and Xfce, at least), and that’s just off the top of my head…
I do not think that the name is such a bad one. They could not come with a name that would exclude either Connectiva or Mandrake and Connectidrake would have been worse. I can’t uderstand the reaction of so many of you. I mean, you can like the name or not but some of you even talk about going to switch to another distro just for a name.
I think that Mandriva is the way to go for now. Let us forget the past and look up for the future of Mandriva. Long life to Mandriva ! Long life to Linux !
“I’d love to know how you discover that it’s lacking stability without actually *using* it. Features that differentiate from other distros? How about comprehensive wizards for both workstation and server configuration, wireless network roaming, support for non-standard display resolutions (10.2 / 2005), a huge number of packages (do a wc -l on MDV’s package list, then compare it to Fedora’s…), broad desktop support unmatched by most distros (MDK’s menuing system, for instance, works on KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, fluxbox and Xfce, at least), and that’s just off the top of my head…”
Mandrake is a great distro with many great features that truly do differentiate it from the competition. Some other features:
– great GUI installer (as good or better than Fedora’s, Mepis, Xandros, SuSE, etc.
– Great partition resizer utility
– urpmi – as good as apt-get, yum, apt4rpm, etc.
– Galaxy theme – one of the best in the Linux world
– In boxed set, all plugins and proprietary drivers supported
– In boxed set, nice printed manuals
– All the Drak tools, which rock as GUI config tools and are quite honestly superior to most other GUI config tools in the Linux world.
And for me, Mandrake 10 Official has been very stable and relatively bug free. I also use Fedora Core 2, Mepis 2003.10, and Ubuntu Warty. Mandrake 10 Official compares very favorably to these distros.
But all that said, the name “Mandriva” is truly horrible, and does not do this fine distro justice. I really hope the head honchos at MandrakeSoft wake up and smell the coffee.
Well, I don’t know. In my opinion, it sucks, even in French.
A new Warrior enter the scene ….
Son of two Glorious hero of GNU/Linux …
He as the heritage and speak the same language …
Everyone on the scene already fear its name !!!
Like the phoenix , it cannot die , and raises from is ashes …
true champion like MUHAMMAD ALI it too is going to be The Greatest after everyone get is new name …
This warrior as a good heart , you can share it with everyone close to your heart.
This warrior is a hard worker , he can do way more then just the desktop.
This new warrior will protect your right and liberty as did is ancestry.
there is something GNU about this new warrior …
this warrior include tools to develop it and work on it …
this warrior is Cheaper , better , faster , better looking , secure.
He is the greatest GNU/linux warrior the world as ever seen!
Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva !
is Name is Mandriva !
because Linspire whas taken 😉
many mandrake users and enthusiasts i know who are primarily desktop users are now flocking to ubuntu. the differences, percieved and reported at least are:
1. ubuntu looks professional and ergonomic
2. ubuntu has an easy to use package management and upgrade system – easier than mandrake because it has fresh-installed repositories. no need to find easy-urrpmi.org
3. ubuntu allows you stay with stable software or use more cutting edge software
4. ubuntu, unlike mandrake, *appears* if not has, a much more sane, stable and predictable development process. you always felt with mandrake that a bunch of undiscipled hackers were having a fiesta behind mandrake’s closed doors!
5. long term presense – ubunti will be around for a while. mandrake won’t or will be in too much flux with no constant direction.
now – why don’t i like ubuntu? its too desktop environment centric – whether gnome or kde (kubuntu) .. you get the feeling they don’t put any effort into other desktops like xfce. also – i think a i686/i586 ubuntu would do well – even from a marketing perspective.
Viva (K)ubuntu!!!
Horrible!!! It just sucks, at least in portuguese.
is at least to come up with a name that’s pronouncable. The triple-consonant “ndr” combination is just very difficult.
In French at least the pronunciation is clear and it’s really only a double-consonant because the “an” is a nasal vowel. But it’s still an awkward, disonant nonsense word.
Connectiva was a good name, they could just go with that. Or use the current wizardry imagery “wand, star, cape, magic” to come up with a name. Nonsense names can work, too, but the best of them — Verizon and Altira, to mention to recent rebranding exercises — are based on Latin roots, so they evoke subtle meaning (Verizon = veri + horizon = truth + vision) and are easy to pronounce in most Western languages.
Mandiva, Mantiva, Mariva would have all been better if Mandrake felt it had to come up with some kind of combination name, but I don’t see that making a huge difference in the marketplace — Mandriva doesn’t exactly make me think of Connectiva. MDK could have done something more subtle, like how Citigroup incorporated the red Travelers umbrella into their logo when they made that acquisition.
When it comes down to it Mandriva is just awful. Please change it soon before you waste any more time and money branding it.
the more i read the name, the more i get used to it.
i guess it was the initial shock (alltho we had been warned).
time will tell i guess…
What was the marketting team smoking when they came up with this name? Is there a marketting team?
I got the email too. Thought it was spam! All sorts of things come to mind as to what they will change in the distro to make it “new” – certainly not improved.
I can just hear it now — “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water — Let the Mandriva drive your desktop!”
I agree, this sounds just horrible in portuguese, english, german, hebraic, persian, czech, greek, aramaic, latin……..
Like some pointed, Mantiva is by far better.
Nova in Portuguese means “new”. And it means “young” too (for females). It means “don’t go” in spanish. In portugues, “don’t “go is “não vá”.
About Mandriva: it seems that no one here liked it. In portuguese it doesn’t sounds good too.
Did they think at all? Did the board meet and seriously think this was a good idea?
I just can’t understand how these things happen. I can’t comprehend one person being so stupid, let alone an entire corporation.
Was there no one to stand up and say “STOP, this is quite possibly the WORST NAME EVER INVENTED.”
…is sort of a let down. I opened OSNews and MandrakeClub in seperate tabs tonight after I logged on, looking at OSNews first. I had to look at mdkclub real quick to confirm it. I am sure it will grow on me, I guess…
Anyway, the comments supporting Mandrake on the fourth page of comments are right on. The features are there, the substance is there. There are a *few* rough edges, but I have found that to be true of all OSes and distros I have seen.
I believe that ppl that complain about Mandrake’s “instability” have encountered some small issue, and just have not found the wherewithal to deal with it, and the ppl that complain so loudly about the name are the type of ppl that are more concerned with style over substance…
They might have wanted to acknowledge Conectiva’s presence in the Brazilian market, and ended up with “ManBra”.
It would even make sense, if they market it as the Linux distribution for users who need more support up front.
Then again, I guess Kramer and George’s father have already trademarked it.
With so many crappy & bizarre distro names out there (*cough* ubuntu *cough*), what else did you expect?
what a crappy name Mandriva
Worry about your freakin’ code, not your name!
What the hell was wrong with Mandrake – other than that they’ve nearly gone bankrupt several times? I suppose they think nobody takes them seriously because they’re not Red Hat or Novell or Sun. So they decided to change track, get a NEW reputation – and then blow that one by doing stupid stuff like this…
Somebody at Mandrake has way too much time on their hands that they could better put to use testing their latest release so no more stupid crap like parted trashing partition tables (because nobody tested it on dual boot systems) will occur. (Yes, I know Fedora had the same problem – this applies to them as well.)
Apart from the fact that Hearst Corporation (who publish the Mandrake The Magician comic strip) sued for trademark infringement and won, nothing was wrong with Mandrake. However, that was quite a *big* thing.
Can’t say as though I like it either. Every time I hear it I think “ManDribble”… very uninspiring. I would’ve opted to keep the name Mandrake. It’s a brand they’ve worked hard to get. No real need to start from scratch in that department as far as I’m concerned.
….better than Mandriva IMHO
Well I suppose in this case saying the exact same thing that 78 other people have already said is meaninful if it helps convince these guys to change the name back to Mandrake (and just eat loss of the connective name recognition).
If this is a language thing with a bunch of French guys not getting how this sounds to the rest of the world that is pretty unfortunate.
HEY MANDRAKE! From Peru and the US! Mandriva is the stupidest most offensive name for a distro I have ever heard!! Change it!
Man-driver… Dont tell me you can’t feel the homo-erotic vibe in that name. Seriously.
“Drive it deep into me, my stud”… Oh boy, I can see the gay jokes about this name just pouring down already. This name is a marketing disaster. Makes you really wonder about their marketing division. Why on earth didn’t they get any community input before making such an awful namechange?
Additional derivations follow directly: Mandriva Club, Mandriva Store, Mandriva Expert .
” If this is a language thing with a bunch of French guys not getting how this sounds to the rest of the world that is pretty unfortunate. ”
I can tell you it sucks in french too. It really doesn’t sound natural to my french ears
Really, I just keep pronouncing it over and over and it still doesn’t sound good.
” If this is a language thing with a bunch of French guys not getting how this sounds to the rest of the world that is pretty unfortunate. ”
I can tell you it sucks in french too. It really doesn’t sound natural to my french ears
Really, I just keep pronouncing it over and over and it still doesn’t sound good…
all the people that dont like the name are the english speking snobs who never learned any other language of the world … i am sorry for expressing myself like this but after reading the comments i just couldnt take it … you are pronouncing the name wrong to start off … its not man as in “a man” (human being) and its not driva (as in slang for driver) the name has no meaning at all except that it is a combo of the two names and the letter A in the first part “man” is pronounced not like a stand alone letter A when you read the alphabet but like the second leter in a word “done” or the way jamaican say ‘man’ and driva is more like “dreva” … both names come from french and spanish backgrounds so try pronouncing the name in their dialect. you get the real name which i think rocks. the above mentioned people also ruined the name linux pronouncing the ‘I’ like you would in an english alphabet insted of “lenux” the right way.
yeah the ignorant idiots in english speking countries are going to make jokes about it so i think they better pick the markets such as south america europe and asia …
I’m from Italy and Mandriva is horrible in italian as well.
What a stupid “idea”.
What if IBM changed its name into IBIMBO?
Would you buy an IBIMBO system?
“Hey man, this IBIMBO server runs MANDRIVA OS, check it out.”
hahahahha
You, of course, noticed that there are a lot of non-english/american speaking posters here?
Even the french and portugese speaking posters agree that the name seems, err, unfortunate.
Considering the Hearst Lawsuit i, for one, would have dropped Mandrake too, but why not use the perfectly fine and well known brand they also own: Connectiva.
– Galaxy theme – one of the best in the Linux world
Please, gimme a break. Galaxy is boring gray and looks very unprofessional.
ps. Could osnews fix this stupid commenting already? It seriously is not that hard to add reply button with quoting support.
i am saying its not the best name but spare the homo jokes (not you in particular) and all the other crap. if you really have a problem with it tell it to them, they might listen (well not likely cause they got all the things changed)… i personaly dont use their product (i choose fedora and/or ubuntu) so i dont care what they’re called.
“Mandriver Expert”-Knows what the gay man wants.
Heh
Mandriva: For the linux diva in you!
Mandrive is a nice name. Get used to it. At least they didn’t choose something with -ix in the end!
’nuff said
I wanted to drop in and say that it is also horrible in Finnish. Now that even our little niche market won’t like it, would they please think up a new name? =)
For people that know anything about wildlife, in some countries this will come to their mind:
http://www.lpzoo.com/tour/factsheets/mammals/mandrill.html
Otherwise people will get used to stupid or odd names – as long as it is not too close to anything sexual or embarrassing. Apart from bringing in mind that monkey creature (mandrilli in Finnish), mandriva doesn’t mean anything and sounds very much like a nonsensical corporate trademark should. Pronouncing it does feel stupid, because placing the accent so that it would sound good is impossible.
Q: How did Mandriva get its name?
A: By a committee that wanted it to be totally un-catchy and sound like there were behind it a bunch of desperate suits that didn’t know what they want to sell and to whom, so decided to irritate everyone equally. But they sure knew they wanted a name to drive away hobbyists and enthusiasts, so other corporations with products having equally lame names would feel safer.
Did they actually think about about this new name?
“Q: How did Mandriva get its name?
A: By a committee that wanted it to be totally un-catchy and sound like there were behind it a bunch of desperate suits that didn’t know what they want to sell and to whom, so decided to irritate everyone equally. But they sure knew they wanted a name to drive away hobbyists and enthusiasts, so other corporations with products having equally lame names would feel safer.”
Good guess! However, what _actually_ happened is most of the possible combinations of “Mandrake” and “Conectiva” were listed, tested against availability and uniqueness, then the ones that passed were put to an internal vote. Mandriva won (though to be honest at least two people voted ‘all the choices suck’). Discounting the people here who are _so_ far into denial/obsession than the first thing they think about when they see the name is gay porn (seriously, guys, you need to tell yourself the truth), I really don’t see what’s wrong with it. MAN DREE VAA, it’s a combination of three syllables that sound OK and combine the names of the two merged companies. Yeesh. Get over it.
Simply because “Mandriva” comes rolling out of the mouth as MAN DRY VAH, and not MAN DREE VAA – it’s essentially a linux distro called Mandriver… and that sure sounds oh so gay, doesn’t it? Oh, it’s no skin off my nose… I just find the name really amusing, becuase it’s pretty much like when Rolls Royce “Silver Shadow” almost was named “Silver Mist”, until they found out that “mist” means “dung” in german and changed it so “shadow”.
If they really wanted to take “Mandrake” and “Connectiva” and slam them together into a new name, then “Mantiva” would at least not have sounded like a drink you would order at the Blue Oyster Bar. Ha ha ha.
Lets do a quick run-down, shall we?
Mandriva – Mandriver, no comment. =)
Mandiva – Man Diva, sounds like a transvestite, doesn’t it?
Mandrativa – A bit unwieldy, but would work
Mandracon – Could work, but sounds like a D&D convention
Mantiva – Best bet so far, imho
But I guess that’s an academic question now…
No, seriously, you have problems. I *am* gay and even if I *did* read it as Mandriver porn wouldn’t be the first thing that came to my mind. Sheesh.
I guess no one really likes this name change. Maybe they will change there minds?
Mandriva reminds me of drivel … definitely not a good thing.
From dictionary.com:
driv·el
v. driv·eled, or driv·elled driv·el·ing, or driv·el·ling driv·els or driv·els
v. intr.
1. To slobber; drool.
2. To flow like spittle or saliva.
3. To talk stupidly or childishly.
MC or CM Linux
(Mandrake Connectiva or Connectiva Mandrake Linux)
Ubuntu was a bad enough name. Mandriva is far worse. As others have commented it’s too much like “drivel”.
How did anyone get gay porn from that name??? I don’t get it. Anyway, I don’t care for the name either, but it’s because it just the way the last part of it rolls off… it doesn’t give an image of freshness, vibrance, or anything of the sort. That’s what I think. Mandribble is what it sounds like to me (and no… that’s not a gay porn reference people. Nice imaginations). Just very “bleh”, but that’s just my opinion.
Personally i dont like the name “Mandriva”, but it could have been worse… i remember when mitsubishi introduced a new model called “Pajero” in spain (my country). In spanish “Pajero” means “someone who likes masturbation a lot”.
They changed the name quickly to “Mitsubishi Montero”
) (mountaineer)
The change is done. The URLs are now have Mandriva. The websites have Mandriva. Even DistroWatch has it listed as Mandriva. They’re not going back at this point.
I’ve been back and forth on this. I though it was okay at first, then I hated it. Now I’m both resigned to it, and getting used to it. Seriously, setting aside the childish comparisons to “man dribble”, or “man diva” etc, the name Mandriva flows nicely, and is even catchy.
I’m still not wild about it, but Mandriva will have to do.
So it’s time to move on.