Submitted by Somewhere in 2001, I bought a computer magazine which came with a Linux CD. I had heard of Linux before, but while we did have broadband back then and was technically capable of downloading a Linux distribution, this method was far easier. This was my first foray into Linux – it was Mandrake. Now, though, it seems the curtain has really dropped for the French Linux company.
I think it’s safe to assume that many of us first dove into the Linux world through Mandrake Linux. Back then, Mandrake was the Ubuntu of its day; it was relatively easy to use, looked pretty darn good, and used KDE 2.x. For someone who came from Windows (this was even before I dove into BeOS; the only piece of software I’ve ever truly fallen in love with), KDE was a haven of customisation, features, and other cool things to explore. Mandrake made all this easy.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end – more so in the free software world. Mandrake Linux was probably the prime victim of the USS Ubuntu (which in itself has become a victim of the USS Unity and the USS Lackoffocus), and as a Linux user, that wasn’t a bad thing at all. Ubuntu was better than Mandrake/Mandriva in virtually every way, and as is supposed to happen, Mandriva was forced to adapt. They didn’t, or at least, they did but were too late.
After emerging from bankruptcy back in 2006, the distribution and its parent company lived a rather bland life on the fringes of the Linux space. It would seem that even that life is about to come an end, though, as the company’s CEO has warned that due to shareholder infighting, the company will be forced to cease all operations come January 16.
I have to take a relatively rough stab at the whole story (since the Mandriva drama has been going on for a long time now), but it appears that a cash infusion of $4 million by Russian investors is being blocked by a minority Mandriva shareholder – with minority standing for a 42% stake in the company. ITWorld states it’s all about the minority stakeholder not wanting to see its stake reduced by opening the doors to a new investor, but I’m sure more is going on there.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s time Mandriva shuts its doors. It has run its course, there’s no life in the old girl anymore. Ever since the company ousted its founder, Gaël Duval, I had little hope of the company rekindling the old flame. Sometimes, you should just let good things come to an end.
I think Mandrake was the first Linux distro I used. I remember using Redhat and SuSE around the same time too but I think it was Mandrake that I settled on before discovering Slackware a few years later (and now Arch)
Mandrake was the first distro I used also, “Mandrake” – kind of a cool name if you ask me.
I think I actually bought it 😮
Long time Gentoo user now
Edited 2012-01-09 15:43 UTC
I started with RedHat and then Mandrake came when I got my Dell Optiplex GX1. It still has Mandrake 10 on it.
I hope Mageia will carry stuff on, it still has one of the best KDE desktops out there.. It’s a pity. That was a nice linux distro.
Edited 2012-01-09 13:53 UTC
I’ve been running Mandrake/Mandriva since I upgraded to it from RedHat 4.1, and have loved it–it makes it far easier for scientists/modelers/developers than the other distros I’ve tried: try putting the GRASS GIS on SuSE, for example: a nightmare: you have to build from scratch, and have major name- and dependency-problems with the libraries. OTOH, whenever I’ve tried on Mandriva (since at least 7.1), urpmi grass just works. And building the latest Subversion-copy from scratch has been quite easy, too (./configure gives you a list of needed libraries — which are all available from an obvious urpmi command.
The one thing I really disliked was forcing a not-ready KDE4 with Mandriva 2010.0 (as many other distros did). Still, it was possible to run a hybrid 2010.0/2009.1 KDE3 environment (which I’m still doing on three of my machines: if it works, don’t fix/break it!).
Sad the way this has played out for what has been my favorite distro.
I wonder how my luck will be with Mageia?
Same here moving to Mandrake back when it first came out and it made me a KDE fan for a long time. I sure hope they work things out.
Thom, I use Mandriva, now, in 2012. As far as I am conserned, Ubuntu, Windows and MacOS X can shut down.
Canonical is far from breaking even with Ubuntu. In what way is Ubuntu superior in your opinion?
I find Mandriva superior for my usage and their developments a lot more useful than Ubuntu’s. I am a free software developer and my software got included in both distros. Ubuntu got an outdated debian package. Mandriva built an rpm, tested it, fixed 2 crashes, patched it and sent me the fix.
This is a sad development. The greedy minor investor will end up owning 100% of nothing. What are they thinking?
If you don’t mind me asking, why do you use Mandriva instead of Mageia? As far as I know the main developers left and founded Mageia. Mageia is supposed to be the true sucessor of Mandrake/Mandriva. I’m just curious and maybe you can shed a bit more more light on the issue.
It doesn’t make so much difference as of now. The main difference is systemd instead of sysvinit. Mandriva is a little more up to date but they dropped support for other desktops, which is a very good move in my opinion. I never got why each distro tries to support every DE. The only difference between them being the package manager. Mandriva is not just a package manager. There are a set of tools that integrate will with the desktop and the user experience. It gives the distro an identity. It makes no sense to customize other DEs. Better make another distro. This is why you get Kubuntu and Xubuntu.
Anyway, back to the main point, I’ll switch in the future if there is any good reason to do so. I don’t regret not switching to PCLinuxOS when it got the hype. Currently, Mageia gets some hype but I’ll wait and see what they put together. Mageia 2 has been delayed. It looks good but I don’t think it is such an improvement over Mandriva as of now. I have high hope for the future though.
Mageia doesn’t seem to have “gfortran”. Show-stopper for an environmental modeler.
They have competent management who hasnt repeatedly run the company bankrupt?
You confuse rich and competent. Canonical is loosing much more money than Mandriva. They just have a billionaire to back them up for now.
Multi-millionaire. He may count his money in Rand, but we needn’t.
Depends on the currency.
A little sad, but only a little. I last used it over ten years ago (when it was still Mandrake), and then only briefly—it just didn’t seem to add that much over other distributions (notably, Debian: at the time, apt-get was head and shoulders above any other package manager. But then, I was never really a KDE guy: even on Mandrake, I installed GNOME).
That’s the problem with most Linux distributions, actually. If the only difference between ABC Linux and XYZ Linux is that one has KDE and the other, GNOME, but I can install either on either, why should I bother to switch? Ubuntu’s differentiation is simple: marketing. Debian’s is that it’s Free Software (and runs on some architectures nobody else does). Slackware is BSD-like. Et cetera. What did Mandrake, and later, Mandriva, have that others didn’t? I honestly don’t know.
Mandrake does live on in a small way: when I worked at an ISP, my boss found out I used Linux and asked me to write up instructions on how to connect to their service using it, so I did; and it’s still online, though long out of date, of course: http://support.netdoor.com/dialup/linux/linuxconf.php Despite the references to Red Hat, the screenshots were actually taken on Mandrake—the boss felt more people would know about Red Hat. (And X-ISP was used because the boss insisted on using a GUI tool.)
For a lot of people Mandrake/Mandriva just worked. You didn’t have to do a lot of hacking to switch away from other OS’s. The infighting of Mandriva happend while the other distros were getting easier to use, which made for a powerful one-two punch.
Mandriva has a lot of stuff that other distros don’t have. The control centers and the tools for one thing. It is one of the few GNU distros that is desktop oriented and works to improve the desktop experience. It is based on Red Hat but it is not just a mod. They have a real development team and it is engineered, solid and stable. They have a marketing problem but they are doing a good job with the resource they have. They have a good balance between quality and marketing.
but few paying customers…
Yep, this is the sad part. Mandriva is a good community citizen. They contribute a lot of stuff back upstream and they are among the few that care about the desktop. Ubuntu doesn’t care about the desktop anymore and they don’t contribute anyway.
If we loose Mandriva, then all distros will loose something. It would be a pity, especially in that scenario where the main looser (the minority shareholder blocking the deal) is so shortsighted. They have everything to win by not blocking this deal. Mandriva is almost breaking heaven. It is breaking even in Brazil and they have a solid plan for the future. It’s better to own 10% of a company that has value than own 42% of a nothing company that you let die. It’s a very stupid move on their part.
Uh, what? In the first place, DistroWatch lists no less that 181 distributions as “Desktop.”[1] In the second place, what is a “GNU distro”? As far as I’m aware the only thing that fits that description is the Hurd. (Yes, Linux distributions contain lots of important GNU tools, and in a technical/legal sense I suppose that makes them GNU distributions as well. But that wasn’t the question.)
Which means what, exactly? (The answer to that might answer my original question.)
[1] http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=Desktop&origi…
And what is a linux distro? I call it a GNU distro because GNU can compile itself, whereas Linux can not. But whatever. This is an endless debate and I do not want to dive into it again.
Mandrake offered the K Desktop Environment on a RedHat base at a time where RedHat didn’t want to distribute it because Qt was proprietary. This was a time before Gnome was usable, so the default RedHat desktop had a choice between fvwm95, afterstep, and something else.
Depends on what you mean by “usable”; I was certainly using GNOME then.
Oh, and IIRC, the “something else” was actually WindowMaker. (Somebody liked NeXT, I guess.)
Edited 2012-01-09 20:24 UTC
It also depends rather sensitively upon exactly what we mean when we say “then”. Times were changing very quickly. I’m not known as a KDE fan these days. But KDE 1.x was hands down fantastic. I have very fond remembrances. I also remember biding my time for the jump to Gnome 1.0. That was in 1999, IIRC. I remember listening to a streaming audio interview (at a time when such a thing was considered de rigueur) of a Red Hat rep who said Gnome 1.0 might be released within, maybe, a year. I was champing at the bit.
My my my. Where does all the time go?
But while I have a tendency to dwell upon the past… I make a conscious effort to look to the future, so as to avoid drowning in the past. So… maybe… I might miss Mandrake a little. But don’t tell Spidey. 😉
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-12 00:18 UTC
“it’s all about the minority stakeholder not wanting to see its stake reduced by opening the doors to a new investor”
Not willing to dilute your shares to raise capital in tough times is an enormous boardmember fail, now he/she probably get pennies per share after the liquidators is finished with it.
Edit: grammer fyl
Edited 2012-01-09 14:38 UTC
Mandrake and Red Hat were my fist distros too.
At the time, XWindows was super ugly with a ugly cross cursor. Kinda reminded me of OS/2 Warp’s desktop.
I bought my copy of Mandrake from Electronics Boutique. It was exciting to get it up and going…but at the time, there was no practical application for it.
Linux has gone a LONG WAY since then. One would think a staple like Mandrake would still be a leader in this genre platform.
I remember Mandrake being quite popular among new Linux users and wannabes. IIRC, it was the first distro that really tried to be aesthetically pleasing with a great theme and lots of eye candy. Was actually fun to try between regular Windows reinstalls back in the day.
Still using Mandriva today. Even though the last distro update messed some things up.
I had fond memories of Mandrake. In those days, the only distributions that felt polished as a desktop were Mandrake, and Corel Linux.
Unfortunately, for what I was using Linux for at the time, all the help pages I could find on the internet were geared towards the latest RedHat, which I had already ordered from cheapbytes.com, and I didn’t yet know enough to work around the differences between distributions, so I ditched it.
I think my experience is a good barometer of the overall Mandrake/Mandriva experience.
I first obtained Mandrake Linux with a book around 1998. It was easy to install and use. Prior to that I had used Redhat and Slackware. I stayed with it as my main distro for many years, and used it at work on the Linux servers – firewall, http, etc. When it veered towards bankruptcy, I even ponies up to be a member of the Mandrake club for an annual fee. I also purchased many boxed sets over the years.
However, near the time when Ubuntu was on the ascendancy, Mandriva (as renamed) starting faltering in a large way. Gael was there no more. The released became very fragile (9, 10). I remember one release where the update program didn’t work, and remained broken for months. Yikes!
In latter part of the ‘Oughts’ (2000-2009), I switched to Ubuntu. Everything worked, upgrades were fairly stable. I had also spent a fair amount of time with Debian for older laptops, and really like apt.
Every so often I still download an ISO of Mandriva – in fact I may still have an active subscription for the Powerpack versions. I better download one quick before they disappear. However, I never stick with a Mandriva release for long. Too many clunky features.
Sadly, it is probably time to shutter the doors. I do wish Mageia well. I have played with it a few times, but the stability is quite there yet for me to use it full time.
I still have a Mandrake 7.0 box-set sitting on my bookshelf at home – magician and all.
Mandrake was the first Linux distribution I tried. I remember getting it in one of those over priced Linux journals, but it was worth the money. I still had dial-up Internet at the time and so downloading it for free was not an option. Still, it was the least I ever spent on an OS at the time.
I remember being exciting to get this particular issue because Mandrake was recommended for beginners and I was new to Linux, coming over from Mac. Anyway, I didn’t stay with it for long. I switched to Fedora. (it was around the time RedHat introduced Fedora).
I’m getting tired of hearing about this company almost croaking. It’d be nice if they’d just hurry up and get it over with. The latest Mandriva (2011) sucks anyway, Mandrake/Mandriva fans would be better off with Mageia… at this point Mageia is more Mandriva than Mandriva itself. Truly pathetic. And even more pathetic is the reason for this supposed bankruptcy… shareholder infighting? Seriously? Just f***ing die for once, and take your pathetic immature shareholders down with you.
Damn straight, and take Greece with you, suckers.
Do you realize that if Mandriva dies, that’s 45 full time paid developers contributing every day to the kernel, Xorg, KDE and other desktop stuff that will go to work for some useless hedge fund or oil company?
Mandriva contributed a little bit to kernel 2.6.35. But other than that, I’m not aware of any kernel contributions by them. There may be some. But they don’t seem to be regular or of any note.
Haven’t bothered to spot check those claims. But I suspect that you are, again, talking out of your posterior orifice.
And you came by this detailed knowledge of the Mandriva devs’ post-bankruptcy professional plans… how?
If some of them can really do kernel and Xorg work, I imagine Red Hat would welcome those skills and talents.
-Steve
And now you are offensive. You don’t bother to check the claims but you spit insults. Mandriva has contributed a lot to the Kernel, Xorg and KDE.
Red Hat doesn’t care about the desktop at all. Ask them, they will tell you to go use Windows.
Mandriva is one of the few distros that still do desktop development. As I said earlier, they fixed 2 bugs in my package and send me the fix when Ubuntu just get a buggy debian package, put it on their repository and don’t even check that it does not work in Unity.
I’ve gone over the kernel development statistic over at LWN, and Mandriva only made it out of the noise once in recent history.
Patch list please? Evidence? You’re the one making the claim.
CentOS/Scientific Linux/RHEL are actually the best Linux desktops out there. It’s not the newest stuff. But unlike with most other Linux distros, it *works*. In fact, it’s my primary desktop.
Granted, Mandriva’s been off the radar for some time, so I haven’t checked. But based upon consistent past experience with the distro, I’d say the pot’s calling the kettle black, here. Poor QA was always Mandr*’s major failing.
Who gives a damn–bottom line is the company is doing no good having bankruptcy threats every damn year. I’m not aware of too much good the company has done in recent years; if anything, their constant state of turmoil is causing fragmentation in Linux. Otherwise, Mageia wouldn’t have formed. I never hear of Mandriva contributing to anything major in general to open source software of the community either, and there sure ain’t proof of any in this thread.
And come on… a programmer doesn’t automatically go to oil companies because he loses his job, Get serious. He’ll go to another open source company (Red Hat), some proprietary company, or even just start developing for one of the other dozens of major Linux distros in his free time instead.
I suppose you searched google and found this link:
http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/
This link actually shows that Mandriva was the 9th contributor in term of line of code contributed in 2.6.35, with almost 30000 lines of code contributed.
I suppose you call that noise because you have never done any serious software development. For your information, 30000 lines of code is HUGE.
Please stop being of bad faith. Just use google. Mandriva contributed to Nepomuk, Koffice and a lot of free software. I already told you I have first hand experience with Mandriva contributing to my project. Anyway, you hate Mandriva so there is no point trying to explain how important their contribution is.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2003/11/04/red-…
Your opinion.
In fact I went right to the LWN.net articles. No Google was necessary, since I knew the information was there.
I take it that this was the only evidence you could dig up for Mandriva kernel code contributions, else you would have paraded that out. It is all I was able to find, as well.
It represents 2.8% of lines changed in 2.6.35. 2.6.35 being but one of ~40 releases in the 2.6 series. Perhaps more to the point, it represents 0.25% of total kernel code.
If the ~1,000,000 lines changed in 2.6.25 is representative of that in the other ~40 kernel releases, then Mandriva’s 29,100 lines changed in 2.6.35 represents about 0.006% of line changes in the 2.6 series. (That’s 1/16,000th) That’s hardly “huge” by any objective measure.
I believe your argument is that without Mandriva, Linux will be substantially the poorer. This evidence demonstrates pretty clearly that users of the Linux kernel would likely never be able to perceive the difference, no matter what happens to Mandriva.
If you had a link to evidence that would impress, you would post it in a minute, rather than resorting to the “just Google it” smokescreen.
I don’t hate Mandriva. I’m just asking you to supply evidence to support your hyperbolic claims.
-Steve
Edited 2012-01-13 00:26 UTC
Steve,
I don’t HAVE to give you evidences. I tell you the facts that I know. I don’t have time to analyze the git logs and compile a list of Mandriva commits for you.
I have not made any hyperbolic claim. I just told you the facts I know. You insulted me saying I was talking out of my ass and now you ask for evidence. Go throw the git logs yourself.
No. I said I thought you were speaking out of your posterior orifice. Do you think my mother taught me no manners? 😉
I started with Redhat, then went to Debian. ’nuff said.
Dave
x2
I’m another one of those who started with Mandrake, kept up with Mandriva and I don’t regret it at all.
Please, let Mandriva die once for all and let the community take care of Mageia, its natural reincarnation.
I’m ashamed of seeing this glorius distro slowly and painfully die of starvation.
Edited 2012-01-10 08:34 UTC
…it [mandrake first, then mandriva] was a nice distro, years ago… I never would have thought it would “go away.”
Edited 2012-01-10 14:41 UTC
I don’t think it will go away. The Russians at Rosalab are doing a great job if you ask me. If Mandriva really dies as a company, the OS will probably keep living in Rosa/POCA Linux.
I’ve tried various versions of Mandrake/Mandriva and most of them were dogs. Version 9.2 (the first I tried, I think) had a nasty bug which would cause my computer (then a 450Mhz P3, can’t remember how much memory) to go into a never-ending swap which would grind my computer to a halt, and the only escape was to simply switch the computer off without actually shutting it down. That version also made some people’s CD drives inoperable (can’t believe I installed that version knowing about that bug – it was my Mum & Dad’s computer!).
Version 10 was pretty good, but others have been unsatisfactory, and there have been bugs like, when you cancel an operation in the installer, a little box comes up with the word “Wizcancel.”. The eye-candy was fairly good, but you could just install the Galaxy theme on SUSE and that would make using Mandrake unnecessary. Also, I didn’t like having to partition the hard drive in the middle of configuring, rather than doing it when it started the full installation.
Does anyone care?
I do. Are you trolling or what? Read the comments.
Wouldn’t think of it. Actually, I’m testing a global configuration of adblock+, and dropped by here because I recalled that OSNews has lots of ads. And noticed this story.
I don’t think I’ve seen the word “Mandriva” anywhere else in months. A quick check of Google Trends and Distrowatch (flawed as those metrics may be) don’t paint a picture of many people caring about it. It’s been falling steadily and yearly since in interest on Distrowatch since 2004.
And Look how it compares with even “little known” distros on Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=mandriva%2C+centos&ctab=0&geo=al…
I have. The story has been up for 1.25 days, and has a paltry 40 comments. (9 of them from you.) And this on a site where a slight change in Fedora’s release schedule is likely to draw hundreds of comments.
And the comments here tend to fall into the general category of “I remember, back in the day, Mandrake was…”
I mainly remember them as that distro that summarily fired its founder for reasons which were unclear.
And let’s face it. The *only* time Mandriva gets into the news any more is when they’re going bankrupt again. So it doesn’t appear that that have many customers who care.
Are you a customer? Or do you use if for free?
I’ll admit that for a team that doesn’t seem to have many fans, you make a good cheer-leading section.
-Steve
If you don’t care, then don’t post comments please.
Many many people don’t care about BeOS or the Amiga, about 9999.999% of the people don’t care. Just imagine for 1 second if they all posted comments in story about the Amiga or BeOS?
I don’t care about goats in Peru. Therefore, I don’t read news about goats in Peru, and I don’t post comments about stories about goats in Peru. I know that there are people who care about goats in Peru and that they don’t want their stories to be polluted with useless comments.
Distributions die, distributions come into existence, companies die, companies come into existence. The evolution works, life goes on.
What’s everyone so frackin’ sad about? Indulging in pointless nostalgia, because here it’s about a Linux company. Their business failed because they sucked at business.
True enough. But in all fairness, they did manage to suck at business for 13 years. Which is, I suppose, worth something. They even hobbled through a (French equivalent of) chapter 11 bankruptcy back in the day. I’m with you, though. Competition on a “survival of the fittest” playing field is good for Linux. It’s not like we don’t have enough distros.
Edited 2012-01-10 21:45 UTC
We don’t have enough distinct distros. We have hundreds of Ubuntus with different wallpapers. Ubuntu itself is 99% dependant on Debian. There are different distros but they all specialize in a niche. There are few general purpose desktop distros.
“Survival of the fittest” means no desktop GNU/Linux, only Windows. MacOS should have died 13 years ago. Windows on the Desktop and GNU on the server. No BSD, no Solaris.
But anyway you don’t care as long as it’s not the distro you use. It’s just Mandriva after all, isn’t it?
Nonsense. Right off the top of my head I can divide the desktop distros into 3 major families with different philosophies: Debian family, Redhat Family, SUSE family. Or divide them another way: Fast & Loose (Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuse…), and Conservative (RHEL/CentOS/SL/SLED).
Granted, there is a bit of a glut in the fast & loose, for newbies subcategory. And it would probably be better if that were pared down a bit.
Apple has a solid product, which would qualify for the Conservative category, were it a Linux distro. Certainly, it’s been of sufficient quality to blow the doors off Linux regarding desktop market share, even though it is hampered with the same market disadvantages, re: Windows as Linux bears, but comes at a premium price compared to the Linux giveaway.
I use several distros personally and professionally. Don’t get so emotionally involved with Mandriva. It’s one of (too) many in the same class. And it appears that its time has come. Since you’re already familiar with Linux, I’d suggest graduating to one of the enterprise desktop clones. Having the very latest packages used to be a benefit. But the Linux desktop has matured to the point that, today, it’s more of a damned nuisance.
Edited 2012-01-11 16:55 UTC
Mandriva is the only one on your list that is primarily focused on the desktop.
You didn’t get the point and you are out of context. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy 13 years ago and was saved by Microsoft in-extremis. With that in mind, try to understand the point.
Don’t get emotional about MacOS X. You don’t get emotional because you don’t use the distro. You are not qualified to give me advise on what I should use. I use Red Hat and Debian on my servers at work. I use Gentoo, Slackware and Mandriva at home. I use gentoo because I can have a full system compiled with -ggdb -O1 so I can get meaningful backtraces for software development. I have multi boot and VirtualBox. I know perfectly what the options are. I just prefer Mandriva for my desktop. I know you don’t care and that it wouldn’t change anything for you if it died but it would change something for me. So please, if you don’t care then just don’t comment.
Ah, but now my interest in the topic has been piqued. BTW, your percentage of posts in this thread has now increased from 22% (9/40) when I first checked, to 30% (15/55). Sorry. As much as you’d like that to be 100%, you can’t have everything.
In fact, it seems you’re having to counter quite a number of people who feel that (the French equivalent of) chapter 7 might be for the best in this case.
BTW, I’m not emotional about Mac OS. In fact, I’ve never used it. Not my bailiwick. But I know enough about it to appreciate its quality.
I find it odd that you would claim that Ubuntu is not primarily focused upon the desktop. Well, one could make a plausible argument that it is moving more in the direction of appliances. Which is as good an opening as any to point out the diversity within the *buntu family of distros.
I spent a few months using Lubuntu, very recently. Excellent desktop. Certainly not for smart phones or appliances. Xubuntu, as well. Though it has been a year or so since I have used it. I’d choose either of them before submitting to a KDE ‘experience’. But there’s Kubuntu, as well.
So there you have it. 3 *buntu distros + Mint which are focused upon the desktop, even if you don’t think Ubuntu/Unity is. (My desktop is perfectly fine without being “rethought from the ground up”.)
Look. If you choose a distro which is perpetually teetering on the brink of disaster, you are always going to be living in fear.
My Gnome 2.2.28 desktop sits upon a bedrock foundation of 4 organizations for at least another 6 years: Red Hat, Inc, CentOS, Fermilab, and CERN. And that’s worth more than a whole slew of unnecessary control panel apps and wizards.
Look. I’m sorry your favorite distro is dying. But it’s time to move on. That’s how life works.
-Steve
OK, I’ll grant you that Ubuntu is focused on the desktop, for now. However, 3 *buntus + mint = 0.5 distros. *buntus are 99% dependent on Debian. If Debian were to close its doors, then you loose all the *buntus and Mint. Also Ubuntu is not contributing a lot. They do Unity and other specific stuff but it isn’t very useful outside Ubuntu. Post a bug in Launchpad an you will see that 90% of the time they will answer ‘upstream bug’ (read: debian will fix it). On the other hand, Mandriva works to improve the desktop with the community. If/when Mandriva dies, I doubt all the employees will go work at Red Hat on desktop stuff. Red Hat doesn’t employ much people in Brazil and Russia. I believe there is more chance that those people will be working for hedge funds and oil companies. That would be a major blow to free software in general. But those guys will be fighting to save their company like they did in the last 10 years and I’ll support any way I can.
Well if you yourself say that Windows is better suited for the desktop than Linux… yeah, I’d say it deserves to continue dominating, in such case (while we watch over and pair down any abuses of that ~monopoly; in itself it isn’t a bad thing, only its abuses are)
Though it seems you naively interpret “survival of the fittest” (or even what “fittest” means) as not far from “survival of the one” …look around you sometimes, that’s not nearly what evolutionary processes unfold – starting from possibly / essentially one organism, or at least a fairly similar group of very basic ones.
With most noticeable differentiations, diversity, explosion of new possibilities happening during the last half a billion years, when pressures increased drastically (when other life became the biggest one), when organisms started to die as a manner of “habit” (earlier, before sexual reproduction, they didn’t really ever die – essentially at most just destroyed)
Oh well, another organism dies, but its code moved on…
The Amiga died 20 years ago or so and there are still people trying to make it live again. Mandriva is a great distro with great people working on it, so yes, it would be sad for its users if it stopped. You obviously are not using it so for you it’s not sad, and you don’t care that some people are using it as long as it’s not you. And you don’t even realize that all distros benefit from the work done at Mandriva.
Grow up, will you?
Nobody benefits from a distribution that struggles for years and years because its makers fight for economic survival.
And why would you think it to be sad that Mandriva is going down? It’s not. If Mandriva ever contributed important things to free software, then these contributions have already been distributed throughout the whole ecosystem.
This is not real life. If you lose a person, you can be sad with good reason, since she or he won’t come back. But this is free software. And here nothing’s lost, even if software “dies”.
I do benefit. Maybe you don’t, then just ignore Mandriva please. What is your problem?
It would be easier to leave you alone in your grief if you weren’t so vocal about it. How I do dread the wailing at funerals…
Edited 2012-01-12 00:41 UTC
Yep. And I love their new logo:
http://www.wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/stills/return_o…
Mandriva is more like a movie I saw a couple of Halloweens ago. A girl is killed in a watery car accident, but doesn’t know it. She spends the rest of the hour and a half moving to California and trying to figure it all out, before her dead friends come for her to help guide her into the murky depths of the local river, where she belongs. It was all very touching.
Again, I’ll ask you for *concrete details* supporting that claim.
-Steve
There is no point in giving you *concrete details*. I gave you a lot concrete details. I can give you more. But you don’t accept them because you hate Mandriva. You consider that their contribution to the Kernel, KDE, Xorg, my project, etc… is nothing. Well, it’s something for me.
Hmm… this should be valid it it was one of the thousands spin-off distro’s from Ubuntu/Debian.
In fact this is one of the core distro’s (although it originated from Fedora). Mandrake/Mandriva has contributed a lot to the community and was for years an example of “how to do things right”. It has had good moments and bad moments, but in general it was one of those distro’s (especially in the early day’s) that just “worked out of the box”. Seen in this light it is indeed sad to see how this core distro goes under.
If Mageia will take over this role remains to be seen. Only time will tell.
Sure – the company itself was never very strong, but that has nothing to do with the distro itself. Do not confuse the two.
People do like to take pot-shots at the successful, don’t they?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XpjjSKVJkk
Yep. Like Puppy and Damn Small.
We’ll see. Mageia removes the albatross which has hung from the neck of Mandrake from the beginning: Excessive overhead and pointy-haired bosses. Remember, they were born of the dot com bubble in 1998. They were going to do an IPO, like Red Hat. They were going to rocket to success doing… E-Learning? (Actually, the “buyfreshclamsonline.com” effort was my favorite dot bomb effort. But even that had a better chance than Mandrake and E-Learning.) That’s what led directly to their very first bankruptcy. (Do not pass ‘GO’. Do not collect $200.)
That’s an understatement.
And now Mandrake/Mageia will be able to compete on an equal footing with the other non-commercial distros. They will either sink or swim. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that they will either resurface or not. Mandriva’s albatross has already carried the distro to the bottom.
In the event of an emergency, even chapter 7 can be used as a floatation device.
Optimism, my friend! Optimism! 😉
-Steve
P.S. Mandrake originated from the Red Hat 5 series and not Fedora. Arg! The Glibc transition! I’ll never forget it! Imagine your libc being binary incompatible with all extant binaries!
Edited 2012-01-11 23:46 UTC
Those are good distros but I suggest Tiny core. It’s made by the man who did Damn Small and is more up to date and it doesn’t run as root like Puppy. It is perfect for old PC.
Linux is shell owned by Occam in Luxembourg which is acquired by Bryan Garnier in 2009. Acquisition detail is available in the publish official report of bryan garnier of 2009 financial report. So its factually incorrect to say Bryan garnier has no role to play, it is playing big role from back door and through their employee Marc Goldberg. Olivier Garnier will have lot of explanation to do as he is the owner of bryan garnier, why he is killing French open source company.
Marc Goldberg was earlier Chairman of Mandriva board before joining bryan garnier. According to minutes of the shareholder meeting of Mandriva official published documents. Marc Goldberg who is now employed by bryan garner resigned from Mandriva chairmanship just 1 day before mandriva was applying for bankruptcy in May 2010, according to minutes of the shareholder meeting recored in registerer. That time chamber of commerce gave 65% discount on the debt of Mandriva ( that time lot of employee become unemployed due to closure of Mandriva subsidiary of Edge-IT).
So linlux (occam) bryan garnier is again playing with the lives of french employee. Mandriva has recently won 2 big projects and its try to establish itself but its seem bryan garner wants to again destabilize open source foundation of France.
Mandriva new investor NGI wants to invest in Mandriva , will not only enhance French IT company eco-system but also retain French employment but bryan garnier stop it for their personal interest. Olivier Garnier has to explain to community why he is against open source, is Microsoft paying bryan garnier to play dirty.