Purchasing decisions today are “based upon business metrics — not how good the technology is,” says Dan Kusnetzky of IDC. “If the business decision maker is unaware of a company or its products, the products won’t be considered. If the products aren’t considered, they certainly won’t be selected.” So, if Mandrakelinux is so user-friendly and powerful, why is it not a household word — even compared to other Linux flavors? In a word: marketing. There is a widespread, if not universally shared, perception that Mandrakesoft’s marketing efforts are far less sophisticated then its technical attributes.
The Mandrake Mystery
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Analyst are the last to trust. Didn’t they predict 4.4 Billion Market for Itanium by 2004!
Look at distrowatch to see where Mandrake is.
This article tells us…nothing.
Wasted 2 minutes again from my life…
Alliances are important to succeed and that’s what Mandrake did: 1) with MacMillan for distribution 2) with HP for HP 3) now with LaCie for Globetrotter… This is a new Linux mobile dekstop on a plugable / bootable /ultra-slim USB Hard-drive that can be plugged to any available PC. This kind of product is very innovative, and I don’t see other companies doing it besides Mandrakesoft…
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/globetrotter
Mandrake may be at the top of distrowatch, but that’s because Mandrake is known in the Linux world. When the outside starts looking in more, I have a feeling they will see Redhat, Linspire, and SUSE since they are the most commercially visable distros.
Redhat is now known in the IT industry as the Linux corperation. And most non Linux users I know only know about Redhat.
Linspire has that Michael guy, who is good at creating a scene and grabbing attention, and their lawsuit with MS over the trademark Windows has brought lots of attention to Linspire.
…and Novell/IBM backing SUSE will be sure to make SUSE very visible.
But what about Mandrake? There’s no publicity there. They really need to get out there and make themselves known.
This article clearly pinpoints something that I have been saying for years. Here’s a few questions:
1) Which Linux company was the first to integrate CUPS properly and make it easy to use, years ahead of its competitors? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
2) Which Linux company was the first to make it super easy to set up LVM’s in an easy way for enterprise storage management? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
3) Which Linux company was the first one to make font installation a non issue? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
4) Which rpm distribution has had a compelling installation tool for years that resolves dependencies, makes package management a snap and makes upgrades reliable? Answer: Mandrakesoft with its wonderful tool, urpmi.
Urpmi is integrated into Mandrake and has been since the inception. It is the only tool comparable to Debian’s apt-get. There are thousands of packages available for it through the contrib and plf repositories. And while apt-get for rpm is available for Suse, it is an afterthought, it isn’t officially supported and the amount of software available for it is comparably small. The same thing can be said for Red Hat, which has no official similar tool yet. And Fedora, well, Fedora decided to have all three, apt-get, yum and up2date, with no clear indication as to why this was decided. Additionally, Fedora with its quick 6-month upgrade cycle plays on a different league than more professional distributions.
5) Which distribution has provided ISOs for download from the very beginning? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
6) Which distribution has the most active community of users? Answer: Mandrakesoft. Check the mandrakeusers.org forums or the a.o.l.m usenet group.
7) Which Linux company was the first to introduce a collection of wizards that made it dead easy to configure terminal servers, email servers, web servers, etc, thereby easing former Windows admins into Linux? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
8) Which Linux company just released the first distribution that works from a USB drive? Answer: Mandrakesoft.
I could go on forever, but I’ll leave it here. For all of those that have heard others bashing Mandrake, give it a whirl and make *your* own decision.
Mandrake’s marketing is indeed pathetic and they are now working to correct that, but the product is beautiful.
It saddens me to see you know who constantly pushing Slackware, when it is by any reasonable and objective observer, a much poorer desktop and server. Oh well, the truth eventually emerges and most people who have tried Mandrake, never go back.
i have tried mandrake, twice. not the very latest because it burned me twice so why should i do it again?
i use slackware now because it is so clean and easy. no bloat.
Is that mandrake isn’t even good on the PR side.
PR is a lower cost alternative to all-out advertising war (that Linux vendors should wage together anyway).
It’s cost them dear already :
There was the fiasco of the madrakestore(was that for 9.1?), that took so long to adress, the boot partition problem with kernel 2.6 that Mandrake didn’t properly manage (they looked guilty whereas it was more complicate than that), The terrible impression left after their begging campaign (nothing wrong with asking money but they are ways to do it), and finally, a less than convincing web presence….
The product has got to be good for them to be still around and kicking so let’s hope they get the communication right and can start really expanding.
I wish that to all Linux distros by the way.
Ain’t that the beginning of a great Hendrix tune?
Anyway, how did it burn you twice? Have there been bugs? Sure, all distributions have them, but I have never had any show-stopping bugs.
For instance, this Mandrake kernel partition problem that Dukeinlondong talks about is something that I recall about Fedora, but have never seen it in Mandrake and I have done hundreds of installs of both MDK 9.1 and MDK 10.0 during our LUG’s install fests.
Of course, if you got burned by playing with a beta, well, that’s your own fault, isn’t it? I mean betas are by definition not a finished product and meant to be used by people who want to help create a better product by reporting bugs.
Showstopper bugs?
It was impossible to get isdn to work with the latest Mandrake and yes that is a showstopper if you are setting up a computer for someone who only has an isdn connection.
Other then that, I agree that Mandrake is one of the nicest distros out there.
On a side note, didn’t Mandrake just land some contracts with the French government? Maybe this will help them get recognized as a serious contender to Suse and Red Hat in the enterprise.
I had tried MDK 8.2 but didn’t think much of it, but I’ve been running MDK 10 Official since it was released (switched from Fedora) and haven’t looked back. Well constructed, looks great by default and urpmi takes the hassle out of installing software (including installing individual libraries as required). Easy URPMI (http://urpmi.org/easyurpmi/index.php) is a godsend. Follow the instructions and you’re good to go.
…but the lack of marketing is right. With some good PR I think Mandrake could really take some ground from its granddaddy RedHat.
Yeah, they did. They are moving a bunch of NT servers over to Linux.
The ISDN problem was corrected through an errata immediately after release. Go hear to read about it and learn how to quickly fix it:
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3
mandrake is a very well constructed system under the hood.
but they need to make it look professional! it looks like a toy or something for beginners or something done by amateurs… (which it has in some sense) … but suse and redhat look like professional systems and this goes a long way in the fickle world of business.
Sorry, but the problem wasn’t fixed for me and many others and certainly not immediately after the release.
Take a look at some linux forums and the bug reports if you don’t believe me.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=…
http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/query.php?bug=874
http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/query.php?bug=903
http://bugs.mandrakelinux.com/query.php?bug=904
So the patch you mentioned fixed only a part of the problem.
Well, Ralph, as I said, there will be bugs.
But I read through all those postings and bugs and concluded the following:
Some of the bugs were triggered by people switching back and forth between the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. The above patch and doing the Mandrake updates indeed fixes the problems as it would have given you a new kernel which properly creates the isdn device entries.
But if you are going to focus on one single instance of a problem, I can find similarly annoying bugs for every distribution.
I think the important thing is to look at the overall picture. In this sense, MDK 10 was a huge step forward in the usability of the Linux desktop.
Compare how easy it is to set up DVD-playback in MDK and Suse, where the user has to rip out kaffeine, totem, xine and go download xine all over again if he finds the right site with the right codecs.
In Mandrake 10, it is one stop visit to easy urpmi and then, add contrib, plf and:
urpmi libdvdcss.
By the way, all distribution are improving by leaps and bounds these days and I actually like Suse 9.1 quite a lot, but I think Mandrake does not get the recognition it deserves for having been a Free Software company since the day one, and for producing some of the best Linux tools around.
4) Which rpm distribution has had a compelling installation tool for years that resolves dependencies, makes package management a snap and makes upgrades reliable? Answer: Mandrakesoft with its wonderful tool, urpmi.
Well when I tried MDK/urpmi about 2 years ago, it was absolutely awful. It crashed often, and when it didn’t crash it usually failed to install whatever you were trying to install. I wouldn’t have called it a “compelling installation tool” back then. More like, “frustrating”. I hope it’s improved since then. And I’ll also note that YasT existed back then, so SuSE is probably around about MDK on that issue and most other issues too.
Not that I’m saying MDK isn’t a good company/distro. Just that I don’t think it’s quite as innovative as you give it credit for being. I hope it continues to progress as it’s a beacon for the Linux desktop community.
I have been using Mandrake for the last six years and I have never had a problem with urpmi. It has made managing servers much, much easier. I mean, was it Red Hat 7.3 or Red Hat 8.0 that gave us up2date.
And Yast was far from being as complete and mature when it was first introduced. If you do a bit of research, go search for a Linux news article where they compared the installation and upgrade tools of a bunch of distributions. (Mandrake with urpmi and Debian with apt-get came on top).
But as I have said earlier in the thread, all distribution are improving and competition will bring more and quicker improvements across the line. I think Mandrake needs to improve its marketing and its default desktop.
>> This article clearly pinpoints something that I have been saying for years. <<
Good points Eu – On balance, Mandrake is still clearly the most acomplished/compelling desktop distribution for newer users out there – many people quietly ackowledge that – no doubt they’ll solidify that position with 10.1.
Maybe Mandrake is still dealing with the legacy of the awful 9.2 release? It caused my system to crash twice, apparently during swapping. It caused ceaseless HDD activity which I could only get out of by turning the system off. But 10 was great.
>> But 10 was great.<<
Yes, Mandrake 10 is good – a significant improvement over 9.2 – looking forward to getting hold of 10.1 soon
– does anyone know where they’re up to with the release date?
Mandrake could use 6 months of the time of a good designer, for web and desktop looks. That’d probably be the most cost effective Euros spent on communication.
For the moment as pointed earlier, it looks unattractive, to say the least.
A point not mentioned in the article or anyone in this thread is the French governments new commitment to open source software. This summer the French goverment made a commitment to try to move completely over to open source in its own IT. This could offer a huge commercial opportunity for Mandrake.
I didn’t want to focus on a single issue. As I said, I like Mandrake and I wish more people would be aware of how good it is.
I was simply reacting to your claim that there are no showstopper bugs in Mandrake. There are (as in probably every software product) and unfortunately I encountered one.
I have tried many Linux Distros. I know enough about linix to set it up, maybe fix a couple of config files like Samba and fstab if I need to, but not enough to manually set up a firewall, etc. For this reason, I am always on the lookout for a Linux distribution that can make such things easy for me.
Mandrake has a lot of promise in this, as it provides GUI tools that make such things possible. The problem? Half of them don’t actually work. If it is set up wrong during installation or needs to be changed, the firewall and routing utilities seem incapable of doing anything to help. This left me with Redhat/Fedora or Suse, and Suse is definitely better with these GUI tools than RH/Fed, but I eventually chose Fedora because a simple script sent I found somewhere in the RH documentation did the trick in setting up my routing tables.
Mandrake should, by all logic, be on my Linux machine, since it promises those simple to use tools that would make my life easier, but the promises are not kept and the tools remain pretty and available, but broken.
Be well, and please don’t flame me, my experience is my experience and your being a programming genius that can figure out how to do everything on Linus is irrelevant to my own experience with it…
The problem is that Mandrake just isn’t easier. RH’s Anaconda and SUSE’s YaST are just as easy (probably easier). Plus, they don’t come with a UI that looks like it was drawn in crayon. Mandrake isn’t behind technologically. It is behind in polish. Mandrake isn’t ahead anywhere. That makes it hard to justify. I can get a system that is easier to install, has the same technical sophistication, and is a ton more polished with Fedora or SUSE.
The fact is that no Linux distro is really ahead of any other. They all pretty much discover your hardware, they all make it easy to partition your drives, they all have easy installers, they all have the same technical ability (since they share almost all the code). . . The difference is the little things like how well things are laid out, what package choises they made that you like, etc. For me, I really like Fedora’s polish. SUSE isn’t bad there, but I still think Fedora is better. Of course, the Debian apt repositories are a necessity for me and their new installer (while not pretty) works really well.
The author has asked, if Mandrake is so easy to use and powerful, why isn’t it a household name? The problem is that it isn’t so easy to use or powerful. It’s right there tied with many other distros that beat it in polish.
And another fine Red feather in the Hat of Mandrake Linux: an alpha PowerPC version of Mandrake Linux 10 is out. Great!
Keep up the good work Mandrake Linux!
<quoth>
Even though Mandrake and other offerings do not have large marketing budgets, Weinberg adds, Mandrakesoft, as well as competitors Debian, Gentoo and others, “continue to capture significant desktop — and some server — audiences.” </quoth>
Let me be the first to say to the big three, “neener neener neener”. Still room for the little guy to do it right.
From my point of view, Mandrake has made Redhat produce the Fedora. Redhat had seen so much changes in Mandrake that I now treat Redhat second to Mandrake.
I really like what happen in this distros. Mandrake had opened an open source competition again that will lead to a more secure and stable linux distros.
Redhat had focused too much on marketing that system innovation had became their least priority.
I agree to what have been said above, Mandrake had created too many innovation since 9.1. I really like the yet to beat urpmi of Mandrake. I was really dissapointed when I installed FC2. If I am going to install (using yum) gcc, gcc-c++, etc., I should have to be connected online. In Mandrake, just fire up the urpmi gcc gcc-c++ and you’re done. Even if you are not connected on the internet. So what’s the use of the 3 FC2 disk set. I said to myself, it’s totally useless. To use it, as I think of it, I should set up my own yum server using ftp. With that I will be installing, dns, ftp and web server. That really sucks. Compare to just typing urpmi gcc gcc-c++. This is really an innovation which they freely give to the community.
Before, you can only find Redhat, but to use that, it has so many limitation. In fact, I really learned much of linux in using Mandrake since 9.1. During my college life, I encountered Redhat 7. During the installation, it warned me already, you should know your monitors refresh rate, horizontal sync, vertical sync. My god what the hell is that. That time I’ve just said to myself, time will come it will become easier, not because of Redhat innovation but because of people dissatisfaction. And now it happened already. A linux distro that lets you install just like installing windows distro.
And from that Mandrake 9.1 I now understand the real world of linux.
Time will come Mandrake will be absorbed by other proprietary-centered executives. But one thing for sure, we cannot stop the community from creating another one. Long live open source developers.
Perhaps we should just focus on a service oriented approach. You earn by making service not by patenting what you have. In fact we are already earning by just using open source systems. We are being paid on conceptualization, installation, implementation and transfer of knowledge. We use Mandrake on all of our servers. I tried openbsd but with the MAC Address restriction level, I wasn’t satisfied. We had used squid-2.5.4 on openbsd and when I compiled it, it says that it doesn’t support mac address (–enable-arp-acl). Second, the obsd is unable to restrict mac address from the pf as iptables do in mandrake. In Fedora Core 2, I am dissapointed to be connected online in just installing rpms that was already saved on my cds. That’s really a waste of time. Correct me if I’m wrong but base on my linux orientation since then this is what I experienced as of this time, Sep2004.
If Mandrake really wanted to earn, they should contract the government or other companies in linux implementation. You can not earn by just selling, sell service, not software. Do your work. You are more credible than others because you are the Mandrake. Don’t think of limiting other kind of linux innovation to earn income because it will just create another kind of Mandrake in the web that will only beat you on another kind of innovative discoveries just like what had happened to Redhat. Lessons learned, charge it to experience, as our staff always quote on me. Mandrakes, know who you are. Find marketing people to penetrate governments and offer service. This doesn’t only strenthen the open source movement but totally leaving Micro$oft on ignorant companies and government agencies. Just want to drop a note to oss community. do focus on desktop, you had already criple Micro$oft on web servers which powers almost 70% of the worlds web servers. Desktop should be taken attention. Openoffice seems to be on top. Can anyone simulate openoffice functionality with the use of qt/c++ because some feel wary about openoffice being the suns/java output. anyways this is just for now. long live open source community. phpmylibrary, polerio, philippines, mabuhay. Just a word to Mandrake, we earned already just by using Mandrake. Thanks for that. This is really the output of service and innovation.
as any other distro out there. If you like it , of course. I have MDK at home as well , installed it once , cute stuff , not for me. Heck , Suse looked better and I still uninstall it from my hdd. Single boot Slackware10 , FreBSD on the small machine/router/proxy and XP for games
I used to worship Red Hat , now all I like is the blue curve theme
That’s all.
In the business world there are only two distributions that matter. Redhat and Suse. They are the only distributions that are certified by both hardware and software vendors to run the enterprise apps that todays businesses use. Until Mandrake or any other distribution gains these certifications it will only remain a personal desktop distribution.
The other thing that needs to happen is that Mandrake needs to change it’s “look”. The community can help with the purchase of MandrakeClub subscriptions to help pay for the above mentioned cerfifications. Right now it looks like Mandrakes focus is on the end user experience not the enterprise. I love Mandake as a desktop but because I can’t get support for running Oracle, or any ERP/CRM product I have to use Redhat or Suse.
IMHO, Mandrake is the best Linux distro out there (and maybe the most OS X-like, after all).
Who cares about “business”: the current “business” concept will be obsolete within a decade, anyway. At least, MandrakeSoft has an acceptably ethical concept of business – much more than Microsoft, Apple (sadly) & Co.!
SuSE Linux is also a very good distro, especially from the theming point of view: it has, for example, the KDE-like OpenOffice.org, which Mandrake sorely lacks (only the ordinary look and feel), and the beautiful window decorations (much better than Galaxy 2, and even Plastik).
I’m really excited about Mandrake 10.1 (which should have been the actual 10.0, probably) – both for i586 and PPC… 🙂
I have used Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, Knoppix, Mepis, and Mandrake.
I think Mandrake is the best all around distro (along with Mepis/Debian) out there, for the following reasons:
* It is one of the easiest to use.
* It has some of the best “extras” for ease of use, ie the “Drake” tools that make otherwise prickly tasks a snap.
* It is easy to install
* IMHO, Mandrake is the best looking distro out of the box. I love the Galaxy theme – the widget style, window decorations, standard background, and the standard screen saver.
* It is one of the most cutting edge distros, in terms of latest and greatest, yet it remains very stable. Mandrake was the first distro to feature the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2.
* It is very fast. Recent reviews over at DistroWatch compared Mandrake 10, SuSE 9.1, and FC2. They said Mandrake was the fastest.
* It has great overall polish. Some posters here have said otherwise, but I vehemetly disagree. I find Mandrake to be extremely polished.
* urpmi, along with RPMDrake (or Kpackage or Synaptic) totally rocks. urpmi is just about as good as the wonderful apt-get.
* It has a great user community – one of the biggest.
* Mandrake strikes a balance of being a great, easy to use distro for newbies, but still has all of the GNU/Linux hardcore goodness under the hood.
* Mandrake PowerPak packs oodles of software, and has great printed manuals.
* Mandrake supports both KDE and Gnome equally. SuSE makes Gnome an afterthough, and Fedora makes KDE an afterthought. Most of the Debian derivatives support KDE only. JDS is Gnome only.
* Mandrake has paid developers that have contributed to KDE, the Linux kernel, and have given the community Frozen-Bubble.
In my experience, the only semi negative about Mandrake is that it’s hardware auto detection and auto configuration could stand a bit of improvement. For that, Knoppix and Mepis win out.
I just hope that Mandrake can get their marketing act together, and can come pre-installed in PCs. It looks like Mandrake is heading in the right direction, though. MandrakeMove is a good offering, as is the new USB external drive. And Mandrake is now available in PCs for France/Benelux customers (bring it to the USA!).
http://www.forbes.com/technology/enterprisetech/2004/08/31/cz_dl_08…
This is from an UN-biased source.
have a good day
Mac
This is from an UN-biased source.
Forbes unbiased?? That’s funny. 🙂
Hehehehe, you are just trolling but I must answer anyway.
>Is Torvalds secretly working for MS?
>(Enderle)Linus Torvalds has probably been a bigger asset to Microsoft than Bill Gates, and I doubt he’ll even get the opportunity to spend the night in Bill’s house.
It’s just makes no sense.
And personally I don’t give a rat about Forbes, the article is clearly biased.
Its been a little while since I tried Mandrake, but I think of as the old-time linux distro – just heap a good deal stuff together with some ugly penguine cartoons arbitrarily placed as decoration, user interaction dependent techie information and clutter everywhere and no significant integratation of the user experience. Most importantly, no vision about what kind of problems a desktop should solve or how to communicate with an ordinary audience.
I believe the CEO defended the policy of including everything with the argument that businesses wanted a “swiss knife” to solve their problems. That is clearly a statement taken from pure fantasy, and I think that real problem is that they haven’t got the people capable addressing the issues that is involved in making a desktop distribution. Which is ironical, since that is what they are trying to do. It is also a tragedy, when you think about what they could have done, especially with the market recognition they once had. Bad marketing is just another symptom of that.
They must either get some Steve Jobs kind people in charge or fade away in the shadows of Red Hat or Novell.
The article was not biased, it gave both sides and did not pick and choose the winner.
Plus, the FACT that CEO’s and the major players read it, but other than that Forbes is nothing…..
whatever you think
Yes, that is an interesting article.
However, the article that concerns us states that Mandrakesoft have poor marketing and that this will hinder them from translating widespread usage by individuals into widespread usage by business.
The statistics at http://www.distrowatch.com suggest that Mandrake is the most widely-used distro at present and has been since 2002. I have tried about 10 distributions since I switched from XP a year ago and this does not suprise me. For this user, Mandrake and Suse are miles ahead of the competition, both for ease of installation and for ease of use.
If it is true that businesses will not buy Mandrake, it is worth asking why. It is because corporate decision makers are so poor at their job they are incapable of spending five minutes browsing the web to find out what is available? (and this must be the case if they have never even heard of the most popular distribution of the last 30-odd months). Or might corporations prefer to buy from “proper” businesses, not from a French company with a crap website who have just come out of Chapter 11?
Whatever the reason, Mandrakesoft have a lot of work to do if they are to keep up with Novell with their Suse and Sun with their Java Desktop if they want corporate sales. They need to work out what sort of a supplier and product their customers want and then they need to sell benefits, not expect features to sell themselves.
atleast for this geek:)
and thats all that counts for me:)
feel free to use whatever suits you, and i will use what suits me:)
peace, love and open source!
“Its been a little while since I tried Mandrake, but I think of as the old-time linux distro – just heap a good deal stuff together with some ugly penguine cartoons arbitrarily placed as decoration, user interaction dependent techie information and clutter everywhere and no significant integratation of the user experience. Most importantly, no vision about what kind of problems a desktop should solve or how to communicate with an ordinary audience.”
ok, so next time you want to bless us all with your wisdom, why don’t you try the product first? but thanks for playing. you score zero.
on isdn – this is being heavily worked upon for 10.1 with the help of stefan barzsus, who uses ISDN in Germany (where it’s apparently still very popular). it may still get screwed up by the insane^H^H^H^H^H^Hdaring decision to shoehorn in udev as the default /dev system during the beta phase, but it’s being done. if it does get to a working state by release time it’ll be pretty neat, from what I’ve heard – it’s going to play nice with mdk’s new network status panel applet, so you’ll be able to monitor and control your ISDN connection from the panel.
anyway, what’s wrong? this is a thread about Mandrake and NO-ONE’S mentioned kde 3.3 yet…:P
Its been a little while since I tried Mandrake, but I think of as the old-time linux distro – just heap a good deal stuff together with some ugly penguine cartoons arbitrarily placed as decoration, user interaction dependent techie information and clutter everywhere and no significant integratation of the user experience. Most importantly, no vision about what kind of problems a desktop should solve or how to communicate with an ordinary audience.
How long has it been since you tried it? Perhaps you should give Mandrake 10 a try, then report back. I guarantee you, Mandrake is none of those things you just described.
Mandrake 10 is extremely integrated, has almost no clutter, not dumb cartoons (but a pretty neat slide show for the standard screen saver), terrific organization of the menus. Plus, the theme/environment is a work of art and very pleasant. It’s all subjective of course.
In any event, it is not fair to judge a Linux distro on a long ago experience. Linux and Linux Distros improve very very rapidily, being that everyone can build upon everyone else’s ideas (thanks to the GPL). And Mandrake has been very dedicated to the Desktop experience.
Give Mandrake 10 a try, and see what you think. There’s little to lose – you can do a free download, or order cheap CDs.
1) Why was this empty, meaningless, dumb topic posted here anyways ?
Answer: because Mandrakesoft does not advertise on OSNews.
2) Why doesn’t Mandrakesoft advertise here on OSNews ?
Answer: because they don’t want to waste their (relatively small) advertising budget.
Mysteries solved…
>
In any event, it is not fair to judge a Linux distro on a long ago experience. Linux and Linux Distros improve very very rapidily, being that everyone can build upon everyone else’s ideas (thanks to the GPL). And Mandrake has been very dedicated to the Desktop experience.
>
You right – I’ll try the latest version. Perhaps I am in for a surprise… 🙂
$ grep -i mandrake /usr/src/linux/MAINTAINERS
0 <===
$ grep -i redhat MAINTAINERS | wc -l
20
$ grep -i suse MAINTAINERS | wc -l
17
from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.%5B0-8]
$ grep -i mandrake Changelog-2.6.? | wc -l
2 <=== amazing !
$ grep -i redhat Changelog-2.6.? | wc -l
1097
$ grep -i suse Changelog-2.6.? | wc -l
1345
You will see the same for gcc/gnome/kde/xorg, etc…
Now the point is :
– what Mandrake is doing ?
pretty packaging. No more.
You right – I’ll try the latest version. Perhaps I am in for a surprise… 🙂
I hope it goes well for you. If you still don’t like it (and I think you probably will like it), there are lot’s of other fine distros. Another one I particularily like is Mepis – very much worth a try as well – you can do the live CD with this one 😉
Personally, I never experienced Mandrake until Mandrake 10 Community came out, so I could not say how it was in older versions (for which I heard some mixed reviews). But I am one happy camper with Mandrake 10.
Dump Mandrake! A poor quality distribution.
Ther are things a business needs to know and do to be and remain viable, in order of importance
1. Please the people paying for your product.
2. Please those who may pay for your product.
3. (Try to) please the others.
Redhat has this their way of business, even if they do not say so. A business cannot survive by begging its would be customers for their money. You have to make people want to pay. You cannot offer something for free, and ask people to pay for it, and expect they will actually pay out of ‘goodwill’. You must provide extra value for the amount you want people to pay. redhat knows this. It only offers some features to a select paying group of customers, like 5 year installation, errata and update support, and that has nothing to do with the GPL. Mandrake would stretch itself thin with it hectic release cycle if they tried to support that certification and guarantee level across the board on all its products. Mandrake has not business plan. They try to sell a distro and maybe t-shirts and other non Linux related stuff. You cannot run your business on expectations of goodwill.
riiiight.
red hat’s budget? subsidised by IBM. massive.
SuSE’s budget? subsidised by Novell. massive.
Mandrake’s budget? subsidised by no-one. tiny.
Mandrake’s kernel team contains two guys who spend their entire time updating Mandrake’s kernel. The KDE and GNOME teams are one guy each, more or less. A lot of the work that goes into the main distribution is done by unpaid volunteers. people bitch continously about how few paid support staff Mandrake have. With their comparatively large budgets, Red Hat and SuSE can afford to hire kernel developers. That’s great, and it’s great that they use their money in that way. Mandrake just doesn’t have that kind of money, though – it’s not like they’re coining it in hand over fist and not passing on the proceeds to the community. They’re making an excellent Linux distribution on a very tight budget and contributing to the community as much as possible; MDK is a large source of upstream bug reports, for e.g., and all MDKsoft-developed code is open source.