“MandrakeSoft would gain nothing by joining United Linux, and doing so would damage our reputation. Joining United Linux could destroy many of the features that have made Mandrake Linux so widely popular, such as our “easy to install, easy to use” approach. It should be noted that several recent polls indicate that the four United Linux companies currently rank lower than Mandrake Linux in market share.” Read the rest of the MandrakeSoft’s position on UnitedLinux.
Mandrake: Why We Won’t Join UnitedLinux
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Eugenia Loli
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The title of this post is a resume of what United Linux has brought to Linux market !
MandrakeSoft would gain nothing by joining United Linux,
Will somebody win something with it ?
If someone wins something I am pretty sure it will not be the end users.
and doing so would damage our reputation.
I see Mandrake as a cutting edge distro with a “full of bugs” reputation, but it’s needed on the Linux arena and Mandrake has its place conquered; but reputation …
According to the following link, Mandrake is the world’s number 1 distro in terms of market share…
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/bsa/position
They are obviously biased, but the sources they quote at least sound reliable. The questions is, how reliable?
We’re French and proud of it! We fart in your general direction!
Does that mean that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries?
“MandrakeSoft would gain nothing by joining United Linux, and doing so would damage our reputation”
I’ve always heard Mandrake was bloated and kind of unstable .. can’t get too much more of a worse reputation than that
Ni!
I will say “Ni” to you again, if you do not appease me!
It’s an excellent training ground for newbies, although you can’t beat gentoo once you master kernel compiling etc
Keep up the great work Mandrake, look forward to 8.2++
Antarius: I think it’s Nih, just because when I watched it, we had closed caption on. But anyways….
Anyway, as we can see here, Mandrake is only out to better itself, rather than the whole Linux community. Linux NEEDS a standard, it HAS TO HAVE a standard otherwise it will NOT grow (and you can quote me on that).
UnitedLinux in name poses an explicit challenge in the way Caldera calls its distro OpenLinux: that GNU/Linux distros out there are not united and that something needs to be done about it. But this something has already been done: LSB. Indeed, achieving compliance to LSB would be much better than being a member of UnitedLinux (in which I can see no purpose other than pooling developer resources). Of course, we do not see Red Hat or Mandrake readily agreeing to conform to LSB; it will be only achievable by them in the middle term (say 5 years or so). By then, everyone here and now will be running on Gentoo (or other source-based distros) .. haha! 8)
Universal standards are exactly what Linux needs to advance and be competitive. It’s all a matter of which “standards” survive – VCR or Beta – Mandrake or United Linux.
Their statement comments that compatibility isnt important as the code can be compiled for any platform.
What a load of plonkers – Mandrake is supposedly a Desktop OS – Desktop users dont want to faff around with CLI’s and compiling code, they want to click on a Binary and watch it install ( this itself is somewhat troublesome under Mandrake Linux!! )
Why? Easy.
UnitedLinux is geared towards the enterprise, not desktop!
Also, the fact that Mandrake is generally known for it’s 100% compatiblity with Red Hat…
I see Mandrake as a cutting edge distro with a “full of bugs” reputation, but it’s needed on the Linux arena and Mandrake has its place conquered; but reputation …
I wouldn’t exactly call it cutting egde nor would I count it as stable (almost bug free). Mandrakesoft certainly needs for QA guys there. Even Red Hat latest one, 7.3, seems to be a better job than 8.2. Of course, I’m using Mandrake cause my printer, as much as I try, doesn’t work on Red Hat.
Keep up the great work Mandrake, look forward to 8.2++
The next release would be 9.0. I expect nothing different except maybe updated software, and some fixes to it’s installer user interface. But I hope the next release to shove unstable pre-1.0 software down the users throat, like Drakconf (0.9.5 in 8.2).
I’ve always heard Mandrake was bloated and kind of unstable .. can’t get too much more of a worse reputation than that
Oh, yes, you could. First, adopt a name like Winux. Make a product like Mandrake, claim it runs Windows software and worst of all, announce per seat licensing. Haha! 🙂
Anyway, as we can see here, Mandrake is only out to better itself, rather than the whole Linux community. Linux NEEDS a standard, it HAS TO HAVE a standard otherwise it will NOT grow (and you can quote me on that).
LSB is a standard. UnitedLinux is a pooling of resources to eliminate redundant investment. LSB is for distributions to be compatible with each other. UnitedLinux is where SuSE, Turbolinux, Caldera and Connectiva pool their resources and create one distribution, saving money and enabling them to do more with their money.
Universal standards are exactly what Linux needs to advance and be competitive. It’s all a matter of which “standards” survive – VCR or Beta – Mandrake or United Linux.
But there’s a difference. Mandrake’s target market is the desktop, while UnitedLinux target market is the enterprise.
What a load of plonkers – Mandrake is supposedly a Desktop OS – Desktop users dont want to faff around with CLI’s and compiling code, they want to click on a Binary and watch it install ( this itself is somewhat troublesome under Mandrake Linux!! )
I wonder who said in this thread that people want to compile stuff. Mandrake said that to prove that it is easy to port software between distributions.
The most famous linux distro in the world the Red Hat linux. This is the de facto standard, and the Mandrake is binary compatible with Redhat (mostly). IMHO the Mandrake 8.2 is relative stable (not more unstable than SUSE 8.0). But I waiting for the new mandrake and redhat with the gcc 3.1 compiler and GNOME 2.0.
such as our “easy to install, easy to use” approach
Is this approach the same one where the mandrake installer forgoes regular-shaped, high-contrast, clearly understandable white & black radio buttons, which make sense to everyone whose ever used MacOS/Windows, for ambiguous-looking “star” radio buttons whose light blue background + slightly darker blue foreground & blurry contrast makes it difficult to see which selection has been chosen? Or is it the approach where instead of using check marks on the side of the screen to denote what steps have been completed they use a long line of circular red/green indicators on the side (which until recently had stars in the middle. And before that, were actually stars themselves. What’s up with this star fetish?), which are not quite as blatantly obvious as check marks (and will give people with red/green color-blindless a really bad day)? I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding how what United Linux is trying to do could hurt Mandrake’s usability any more than Mandrake has been hurting it through their attempt to make their installer look “purty”. (not that RH’s installer is really much better, but at least they’ve switched to recognizable widgets in the last two years).
Isn’t this exactly why many of you dislike Microsoft? I must say that united linux is a good idea (I can’t say if it is done in such a way that it is a good thing, that I leave to others). Why not agree on things that only will hurt the users if they are different?
The important part here is:
‘ls’ on debian will do the same thing as on redhat or mandrake. I haven’t heard anyone (sane) say that this is a bad thing. Why couldn’t the rest be just as standard? Keep the files at the same location, make sure that I can go from one distro to the next without getting everything fucked up. Have the same formats not only for tar/gz but for packages as well. How hard can it be, it is a bit of paths and the binaries packed into a single file. I don’t see why developers should need to compile and package for each system, it is dumb.
And, why oh why would Mandrake loose? The only way they can loose is by being worse than the competition and then it would be easy to switch from Mandrake to <competitor X> because of united linux. Scared of competition are we? Could be the elderberries of course though…
And they can still add value. It’s not like linux is functionally complete, there are tons of new improvements to be made. Release them first with Mandrake and then open source them when your new stuff comes with the next release or something. But don’t whine, we have enough of that from Sun.
Before the Linux Standard Base, there was a “de facto” standardization phenomenon. When studying the Linux distributions, it is clear that most of them are based on Red Hat, Debian and Mandrake, which qualifies them as de facto standards.
Heh. A little over-proud of Mandrake, since historically it was “Red Hat with KDE added” and those roots still show when you compare the two.
I said, “Universal standards are exactly what Linux needs to advance and be competitive. It’s all a matter of which “standards” survive – VCR or Beta – Mandrake or United Linux.”
You replied, “But there’s a difference. Mandrake’s target market is the desktop, while UnitedLinux target market is the enterprise.”
There still has to be compatibility. Applications, GUIs, and install packages should all be interchangable between every disto. Are you suggesting that a server machine shouldn’t ever run a desktop app, or vice versa? Or developers should have to release different versions of their software? Without universal compatibility, that’s where Linux is headed.
This is really sad. Well, mandrake will eventually lose. I cant really see
much in UL that is a step back for Mandrake. They should still be able to ship what they think is so “special”..
I think the main reason is that UnitedLinux is striving to be a rock-solid enterprise platform and Mandrake is more interested in showcasing a piss poor release process and delivering a buggy product.
There still has to be compatibility. Applications, GUIs, and install packages should all be interchangable between every disto. Are you suggesting that a server machine shouldn’t ever run a desktop app, or vice versa? Or developers should have to release different versions of their software? Without universal compatibility, that’s where Linux is headed.
But really, does grandma and grandpa needs stuff like Oracle and Apache, and does admins need things like OpenOffice.org and KDE? See the difference? It is a completely different target audience with completely different ISVs and software types. It is two different markets, and as of now, it doesn’t make sense forcing the Average Joe to use an OS made for mainframes with a nifty UI above it.