“Mandrake is known from it’s ease of use and configuration tools, and is commonly regarded as a “newbie” distribution. I am a long-time Gentoo user and before that I have used Sorcerer and Debian among others, so I regard myself as an “advanced” Linux user. This review tries to find out how good distribution Mandrake is for “advanced” users.” Read the article here.
Mandrake 9.1 – Review from “Advanced” user’s POV
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I guess the distro doesn’t really matter. You can use Mandrake or Redhat and still manually configure it like Slackware or Debian.
I totaly agree with you…
I’m a power user. I need all the compilers I can get, all the dev libraries and stuff.
I also like to play with diff software, diff wms, office suites, etc.
I know people think that redhat/mdk are equivalent..except for some major differences.
Mdk supports more filesystems out of the box..specificly xfs
Mdk supports more hardware..usb wifi comes to mind.
Mdk gives one much more choice in rpms..Ever tried kde on redhat? how about icewm? or xfce?
In my mind the two distros do not compare equally..Redhat is the market leader and it does get more(better?) QA than mandrake, but Mandrake gives me as the user more choice.
I liked this review a lot. I also consider myself a power user, if not an advanced user. Mandrake has everything and more that I ever need. I’ve tried just about all the major distro’s and MDK is the only one that really feels right. Plus, the MDK community is the best IMO. Not like the gentoo forums where everyone is so quick to yell RTFM, or “try search…”
Well, same weird objection I’ve seen elsewhere, getting 1/3rd of the distro and then complaining that packages are missing…yeesh
. wine and mplayer are both there if you actually bother to download the whole product, for the record. And -devel packages aren’t actually an extra step: if you know you’re going to need them, just pick them for installation, and urpmi / rpmdrake will obviously install the actual library as well. So don’t select libfoo then select libfoo-devel, just select libfoo-devel and libfoo will be automatically pulled in…
I disagree about the gentoo slur. I am _not_ an advanced user, and yet – whenever I have had a problem, and can’t find the answer or a HOWTO in the forums – I use the IRC, I have NEVER been RTFMed. YMMV, but I do think that gentoo’s forums and user support are amongst the best.
I agree with you on that.
I think its more about how you ask a question,
1. heh! help me with this!
2. could you help me with this?
I am a lot in the gentoo forum and never ever experienced
lame or RTFM responses myself, i do know however there
are certain people out there that think they are GOD…
Well, you can find that kind of people everywhere, even on Windows or BSD forums…
I don’t quite understand the sentiment when people complain about being told to use search.
Google and the search functionality in forums rarely lets me down. When it does, I usually have a pretty wierd problem, and when I ask my question I note that I had no luck in Googling or searching for the answer already.
I’m not a Gentoo user, but I have browsed the forums on occasion and it looks like a good place to be.
Since Gentoo’s primary user base consists of uber linux gear heads, the amount of technical knowledge on the forums is massive… but it’s never stfu/rtfm bullshi* :] It’s always “I have a question about ::whatever::” and 30 seconds later you have ninety replies with more information than an O’reilly book could ever provide lol…
Back on to the topic at hand…
I liked this review. Mandrake, IMHO, is the best distro to start off with. It (in theory) “just works” and lets the user get his or her feet wet without having to go insane trying to figure out how to get apps installed, adding hardware, etc.. On the other end of the spectrum, I feel that Gentoo is where you should go after Mandrake if you really want to get advanced… that, however, is a whole other topic :]
I just don’t understand that mindset at all – the idea that the way to get “advanced” is to chop half the useful stuff out of a distro so you’re *forced* to do it all manually. You can do all the “advanced” stuff you could do in gentoo in Mandrake. If you’re going to use gentoo, do it for a sensible reason – the idea that it allows you more customisation and the compiler targetting makes it faster. It’s not more “advanced”, that’s a ludicrous statement.
I’m posting this question here and on a couple of other (Linux) forums. It might sound stupid, I know, but…
I’m going to upgrade from Mdk 8.2 to 9.1. I have the 8.2 PowerPack Edition and like the packages it has I use very few…it’s just for working on: I use StarOffice, for example. I don’t screw around with multimedia on it much.
So my question is this: is there any CLEAR advantage to buying the 9.1 PowerPack rather than the Standard (which doesn’t include a few of the things I like)? Or will I miss nothing just buying the Standard and upgrading the OS parts, leaving the installed applications alone? Remember, I’m not worried about having the latest media players, etc (and I can get them on my own later if I want them).
By the way, I have dialup, so downloading is out of the question. Thanks in advance to whatever advice others can give me!
The choice between that Power Pack and the standard one is more a question of “do you want everything to work from the CD”. There’s nothing in the Power Pack that you can’t get by downloading the rpm from the net…
So, if you only need few of the applications from the Power Pack, there’s isn’t a clear advantage in buying it. If you plan to use most, it may be less hassle to already have everything on CD than to download 4 CDs worth of rpm…