Submitted by Controversy in the Mandriva world this afternoon. Vincent Danen is all doom and gloom, citing declining numbers of posts to mailing lists as evidence of a shrinking community. However, Javier Villacampa points out in the comments that the community is spreading out to different places, and Adam Williamson responds to Vincent, citing fast-growing numbers of users and posts on the official forums.
What’s to say? Confusion rules, and if that’s indicative for how the company is run they’re gonna go down. It smacks of decisions based on panic and gut feelings without proper consideration of longer term changes and trends.
It seems confused, alright, but I can’t for the life of me see how this particular confusion has anything to do with Mandriva as a company.
To me, it just seems that someone counted apples and called them pears.
I think they will do just fine, right now a lot of companies are trying to re-invent and change to survive.
The beauty of any Linux distro is the fact it lives on in other means even if it came to an end.
I’d say counting posts on mailing lists is fundamentally flawed for various reasons:
Back in the old days mailing lists where the place to go – that is done by forums now.
Linux got a lot easier to install.
There is a lot of info out there – usually you find a fix thru a searchengine without posting anything anywhere.
It’s also a lot faster than waiting for someone to answer a post.
Plus some mailing list are notorious for flamefests that take up about half the posts there.
Other thing is – but that is only my subjective feeling – that there seem to be much more redundant questions on mailing lists because most of them are a pain to search.
Normally the only people that post on mailing lists anymore are those that need a fix for a very specific problem and take it to a specialized list for an app/distro where there is no forum around and no fix to find otherwise.
Edited 2008-12-06 13:57 UTC
Ooooooh, have you hit on a pet peeve of mine, there!
Mailing list archives without a built in search, that only give you that silly default view where you can click the month and tell it whether you want to see the month’s posts by Date, Name, or Thread. Which don’t even bother to provide a link to a third party site that does the list maintainer’s job for him by indexing the list and providing basic search capability. And which furthermore has wise-ass regular posters standing by, ready to scold and humiliate, on a moment’s notice, any poor newbie who happens to ask a FAQ.
I think things have gotten a *little* better. But there was a time when the above paragraph described most of the extant FOSS mailing lists.
Gets me worked up just thinking about it! 😉
Edited 2008-12-06 16:17 UTC
Hech, I will supply my own search software.
Just give me a means to download the entire mailing list and I will do my data mining.
I find it a pain that the OS listings that I read gives me no options to reset the pointer to the very start and have every single post send/download to me.
If anyone knows how to do this with Free-Lists ( http://www.freelists.org/ ) please post how.
Edited 2008-12-06 16:35 UTC
I just refuse to deal with mailing lists. I can’t stand the quote formating and having to dig through things and click on link archives just to find whatever I’m looking for. It’s a personal preference obviously, but I see why mailing list usage would decline.
GNU Mailman, how I loathe thee.
The number of times I’ve given up on trying to find an answer to some questions after being greeted by some damn Mailman archive without search is uncountable.
Here’s a tip: i dont have fscking time to wade through 5 years and thousands of post to find the answer.
Seriously, if it’s 2008 and there’s no good search for your mailinglist archive, give up.
Oh DAMN apt-get…
you made life much easier…
Edited 2008-12-06 17:41 UTC
Ok, next try following
sudo apt-get install life
😉
Man I tried that. It wanted to pull in a lot of additional packages while uninstalling some of my favorite packages. I felt that I didn’t need that baggage so I canceled the operation.
E: Couldn’t find package life
🙁
I agree with klimg. To be honest, I wrote the story (it’s my text :>) that way a) to provide a surface gloss of impartiality, and b) to make it more interesting. Of course, my numbers are right and Vincent’s are rubbish.
The mailing list numbers are just going down because users don’t use mailing lists any more, only developers do. Users use forums.
And yet fedora-list has hardly declined at all, despite the popularity of their forums:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.general
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.linux.mandrake.newbie
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.linux.mandrake.expert
—-
Fedora forum members: 124,309
Mandriva forum members: 56143
http://fedoraforum.org/
http://forum.mandriva.com/
Edited 2008-12-06 23:21 UTC
The low numbers in the English forum, maybe it’s caused due to all the localized Mandriva communities.
blogdrake.net (Mandriva-ES) : +12,400
mandrivabrasil.org (Mandriva-BR) : 4.475
mandrakeitalia.org (Mandriva-IT) : ???
mandriva.co.il (Madnriva-IL) : ???
mandrivaclub.nl (Mandriva-NL) : ???
I know very well blogdrake.net , it is a very active community and the growth has been continuous for the last 2 years
This might explain the “low” numbers in the main forum.
Salut,
Sinner
sinnerp: um…what low numbers in the main forum? The numbers I cited are hardly low.
As the links I posted in the parent post show, compared to Fedora, the Mandriva forum participation is low, and the Mandriva mailing lists are low, and have also dropped precipitously in the last few years, while Fedora’s have remained relatively steady.
It was not my intent to demonstrate low Mandriva forum participation in my post, but to note that Fedora’s mailing lists have remained strong *despite* their strong forum participation.
You had said:
“””
The mailing list numbers are just going down because users don’t use mailing lists any more, only developers do. Users use forums.
“””
And that does not tally with the Fedora community participation evidence.
Edited 2008-12-09 03:14 UTC
You forgot the German community MandrivaUser.de
And of course you forgot all the other communities outside the Mandriva world, like mandrivausers.org which is a very large and active one.
Concerning the German community it is really so that the mailing list activities went towards zero because of the community forum which was built out of the mailing list community.
I never went back to it after they changed to mandriver ..
Sorry… I subconsciously started checking out other distros
After sinking $1000 in donations to Mandrake, I just lost the motivation…
What’s in a name? funny that, I eventually settled on ubuntu even though the name kinda sucks, and the colours are the first thing I change (brown is my least favourite colour)
Up until the merge, I was a diehard mandrake user…
Strange that..
It’s funny that the merge didn’t change anything but the name at Mandy. They still don’t have a clue how to make money in the Linux business, and they still don’t get the community importance. It’s never changed and it’s been that way since Mandy 7.0.
Funny how you changed to Ubuntu. Personally, after using distros with configuration utilities like Mandriva Control Center and YaST, I can’t use another distro without such a wonderful tool. It’s not that I can’t do things from the command line or edit a configuration file, but why? MCC is just plain wonderful for such stuff.
Personally, I use PCLinuxOS. It’s Mandriva done right.
Exactly.
Well, aside from the lack of KDE 4.2 packages and the repo being frozen at the moment, but those problems should be sorted by 2009
will add more users. They can sell Gdium or other Netbooks with Mandriva preinstalled (profit) and they can sell a netbook edition CD. I do not think Mandriva is in problem.
Entertaining. Too bad some fools will take it seriously. The number of posts in a mailling list or the number of posts in a forum indicates the number of people who posted on the mailling list and the number of people who posted on a forum. Nothing more, nothing less. People want to know how popular is Mandriva? Mandriva is not a horse in a race. It won’t finish the race 1st or 2nd or last. What does it mean to be popular exactly?
I don’t care how much you think Mandriva is popular or not. I like the distro, it fills my needs.
I know you guys like competition and such. When you watch sport you don’t care about the sport but you only care about the score. You want to see Mandriva compete with Fedora and Suse and win or loose with the score being the mailing list post number. Go spam your favorite mailing list in that case. Fact is they use the same software and feed each other. Free software is like that.
Edited 2008-12-08 06:52 UTC
I don’t think so, there’s a little bit more to this. Many people (like me) look into the forums and other platforms (if there are any) as part of their evaluation of a distribution. If a forum is quite alive with activity and users keep up a friendly and polite environment, not too many flame wars and a friendly attitude towards newbies – that’s a very strong point in favor of the distribution.
More: a close connection between this forum community and the developpers and the company management is also a very strong asset of a distribution.
In short: what goes on on user’s platforms of a distribution is important, it’s not just numbers.
Mandriva has long been my favourite distro for most machines i use, the only exception being my Mac iBook which is running Debian (second Favourite distro).
Despite what some are saying here about Mandriva i think it is a solid distro with some very good features and always has been since the early days.
Now if only i can figure out the damn issue with the boost libraries so i can compile Wesnoth!!!