Dear Mandrake,
I used to be both a user of Mandrake (from v7.2 -> v10) as well as a renewing member of their Club. For various reasons, both personal and not, I decided to switch distros in August of this year. I wanted to try a Debian distro and experience that side of Linux [this would be the proverbial “grass is greener” scenario].Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
I’d toyed with Slackware (7.1) a couple of years ago, after a serious Mandrake crash [to which I place no blame on Mandrake necessarily]. However, there were two things that bothered me about Slack: one which I couldn’t reconcile, and one which I was to stubbornly delay appreciating until now. Firstly, package selection with Slackware. The selection of packages on the CD is apt (in the barren, Scandinavian-designed sense of the word: functional, practical, scalable), but it scarcely measured up to the difficulty I had finding the packages I wanted, in TGZ format for smooth installation, a la Mandrake’s “urpmi” utility [this was, of course, several versions ago]. More often than not, I’d need to compile packages from scratch on Slack. For me, this is the technological equivalent of doing my laundry in the sink: effective, yes…but is it the best use of time for my needs? Lord, no. Secondly, I didn’t want to tinker with config files. It’s one of the most common reasons people have for using a Linux distribution like Mandrake, Linspire, or any other “beginner’s Linux” distro [“beginner’s Linux”: this is not meant as a condescending term – you are what you market yourself as]. I just didn’t want to bother. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t want to learn Slackware, so much as use Slackware. In retrospect, a somewhat wilful misunderstanding.
We – those of us who use or have used “beginner’s Linux” – don’t want to be bothered tethering every rope and swabbing the deck on the ship: we’d rather steer the boat and polish the brass so that it’s nice and shiny. It’s nice to have someone else do the manual labour. Thus, when a distro offers a vague sense of self-configuration, it’s the easiest decision a newcomer to Linux can make.
I wasn’t displeased with Mandrake when I left. Not entirely. Well, okay, I was, but it wasn’t all Mandrake’s fault. Firstly, the finger of blame. Although I understand that Mandrake has experienced it’s ups and downs, it’s growing pains, and it’s financial hurdles as of late, I could not understand it’s concurrent yet divergent obsessions with delivering a point-release every six months while also totally neglecting such mandatory investments as a semi-robust message-board for it’s users, namely those who are MandrakeClub members. There was a forum [your customary PHP-based message board], but when it wasn’t being moved from site to site [and thus losing months of A-class valuable posts/suggestions – this happened when they moved the original forum from mandrakeuser.org to it’s current address], it’s search-functionality was broken, and the organization of it all seemed amateurish. For a $100/year, I got tired of feeling like I was wasting my time in someone’s poorly thought-out Yahoo Group.
But, as you say to someone you’ve split-up with, it’s not “you” which is the problem, it’s “me”. You see, in the beginning, it was really cool to have a distro that was bleeding-edge. There was quick access to new releases, and Mandrake rpms were readily authored and available. This was living in Windows-world: “What’s that? A new release? Here, let me download it immediately and run ‘install.exe’!“. Mandrake at least offered a taste of this (complex, politically-charged) simplicity. Unfortunately, I couldn’t kid myself any longer when – just at the point when I was tweak-happy with Mandrake 10 – they were already prepping the beta of 10.1. After four years of semi-monogamy and increasingly begrudging respect, I just decided that I didn’t want to upgrade…again. I got tired of the MandrakeHydra: one serpent to spit out an endless stream of betas, community editions, and release-candidates, and another to stand in the way of the proper administration of a more-than-merely functional user-forum.
So, I switched to Libranet. It was a Debian-based distro that seemed to command gracious respect from both reviewers and users alike. An opportunity presented itself in the free trial-version Libranet had recently offered: their latest version, albeit almost a year old, free to download and try. I realised that this was an opportunity that I couldn’t resist, and thus downloaded the ISO and eventually came to be where I am now: a content Libranet user.
Switching to a Debian-based Linux distro was a challenge. I had to undo the “urpmi” and try to understand “apt-get”. And yes, I had to swallow my previous disdain over Slackware and tinker with config files again. Many of them. It wasn’t that I had to, but rather that, for once, I wanted to learn. I didn’t want to give up. And now, nearly three months after the fact, I understand more of my apps’ behaviour because I set them up myself. Conflicts, crashes, and freezes are rare. It’s the hallowed zen of: it just works. Is this a bleeding edge system I’m running? No. But, then again, if everything worked as it was supposed to, you’d be willing to suspend your anticipation for the latest and greatest.
In the end, Mandrake, I’ve learnt that I’d rather have stable eye-candy than unstable menu editing. I’d rather use Icewm than KDE. I’d rather have a good environment with a healthy [if proportionately smaller] user-forum over a ham-handed, brand-laden MandrakeUniverse where some things work great while many others disappoint consistently. In some ways, I still miss you. I miss the KDE-tastic environment, the clumsily-designed-yet-charmingly-personal penguin mascot icons, and the wicked partition tool. To be honest, before I really started to understand “apt”, I could’ve killed for “urpmi” [which I still think is cool].
I never said farewell, though. I just wanted to know what I was missing, and in the course of this, I discovered that I prefer the other side. For now.
Epilogue: Mandrake, I’ve noticed that you’ve changed your user-forums. They seem better thought-out and more professional-looking: it seems you’ve finally responded to months of user-requests. Better late than never. I hope for the best in your progress. Things here are fine.
About the Author:
Matt Cahill lives in Toronto, works in film, but writes to stay sane. He has been a contributing fiction/op-ed writer to various publications, and is currently looking for a publisher for his debut novel, “The Flying Dutchman”.
Libranet’s wonderful. Stable, user friendly, easy to set up Debian. Mandrake, you take your chances with each release. Good job, Matt.
You’ve said a mouthful there fellow – I stopped using Mandrake because of MandrakeClub and its useless amateurish interfacing.
The author mentioned that he got tired of Mandrake’s release cycle. Who says he had to try every one of them? Just simply stay with upgrading once in a while, when there is something worthwhile to try.
That said, I’ve heard great things about Libranet. It’s a great, stable, easy, Debian based distro. Another example of this is Mepis, which is also a great Debian based distro (and totally easy).
Even if you are a Mandrake user (as I am), why bother with using MandrakeClub? I had one month free usage of MandrakeClub when I first purchased Mandrake 10 official PowerPack. I parused it, but it did nothting for me. It’s poorly organized and doesn’t offer much that you can’t already get for free. I’ve heard it described as a “fan club”, and a way to support the distro. But for me, there is no “value add” in MandrakeClub. MandrakeClub is a good idea, but it needs to feature something more of actual value to Mandrake users.
So I support Mandrake by purchasing the boxed set (PowerPack). I comes with extra proprietary stuff, as well as the Java SDK and runtime, and the very good printed manuals (“User’s Guide” and “Reference Manual”). Getting the boxed set of PowerPack offers me a ton of value for my money – 6 CDs of pretty much every kind of software I could ever want, the extra proprietary stuff, and the cool printed manuals (yeah the manuals are already in the distro as PDF or HTML, but I prefer reading from an actual book).
I also made the switch to Debian. I found the Debian “unstable” tree to be just as stable as my Mandrake system was, plus I get to stay bleeding edge with very little work. Every time I hear about a new version of a program that I use being released, within a few days it shows up on my system! Updating Mandrake was much like updating Windows… wipe the drive and re-install.
I would still recommend Mandrake to beginners, but for intermediate users and higher I definitely suggest Debian, especially with the new Debian installer.
One thing that I do miss from Mandrake though… PLF! Packages of questionable status were MUCH easier to get on Mandrake with URPMI… (for example, DVD codecs) I have much difficulty finding apt sources for some of those applications.
Well, icewm is in Mandrake. And all the configuration files are there, too. No-one’s stopping you editing them
. And no-one makes you upgrade, either. Just finished tweaking 10.0 and 10.1 betas are already out? Don’t install them! Don’t install 10.1 CE or 10.1 OE when they’re out, either, if you don’t want to! You’ll still get security updates. Your system won’t explode.
I agree with JeffS, though. No reason not to use Libranet or Debian, either. They’re both excellent distros, too.
Mandrake Cooker works exactly like Debian sid – new packages as soon as the new version is out, rolling updates. I haven’t done a clean install on my laptop since before MDK 9.1 came out.
I also moved from Mandrake to Libranet, with one difference: I share my love between SuSE and Libranet 🙂
I feel that Mandrake has become too greedy: if you want any meaningful benefit from club membership you must pay at least for Silver. The Powerpack comes with no DVD: you must fork an extra 54 Euros if you want one.
And I also don’t see the need for such frequent updates. OK, SuSE does it as well, but from SuSE you can get major upgrades for your current release: KDE, kernel, sometimes GNOME…
With Libranet, on the other hand, you can keep it as bleeding edge or as stable as you want: it is Debian after all.
Mandrake has had its issues, but if he really wanted stability he could have stayed with 10.0 and not worried about the RC’s, the betas, the Community Editions as he said. Not to mention ten was fairly recent so he wouldnt have to worry about Mandrake dropping support for what? Another year? Shoot I dont bother with the CE, I wait for the Official Edition if I’m concerned about stability.
Of course debians reputation is with stability,(that and its hard to work installer) so its no suprise it didnt give him much trouble.
As far as learning the configuration stuff. Anyone can do that with any distro. The simpler distros like Slackeware probably are easier to learn config since they dont make any special changes, but im sure if he wanted to learn how to edit config files in /etc using mandrake, he could have.
I agree with what you are saying, as I was in the same boat. I too was a Mandrake user, who got tired of the constant incompatable release updates. I liked and still like the elegance of being able to do relatively painless udates with apt. However it has been an adventure with me, trying to find a distro that installed to my hard drive with no major issues. I finally settled on Mepis, after problems with Knoppix’s hard drive install. It has required some play to get things where I want it but for the most part it has been a pretty good experience. I recommend that others also give it a shot!
Mandrake PLF=Marillat.Free for Debian.
Just add this line to your sources.list:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
Replace “unstable” as appropriate.
Thanks for the pointer to Marillat… I ran across that the other day, but didn’t pursue it very much. I guess I’ll give it another look!
The author is a prime candidate to switch to Ubuntu. It’s easy and friendly like Mandrake, and just as powerful as Debian.
It’s the first gnu/linux distro where i didn’t feel like i was spending more time tweaking the OS than using the OS to run applications.
Ubuntu is the future of the gnu/linux desktop.
I noticed with Mandrake, they just seemed to take all the open source code, package it together, and put it behind their installer. With Linspire, they actually touch almost every package so that everything really works well together. I also like all the new apps they’ve been introducing like Nvu, Lsongs and Lphoto.
Hans
“touch every package so everything works well together”
please be specific. this means nothing.
Heh, that must be why they still only have a 2 year old version of the fairly popular app, Kino, that I hack on! 😉
I used to use Debian solely. Since I hack on multimedia stuff, I wanted a fairly current desktop. Debian’s unstable was just that for me esp. around the time GNOME2 came out. So, I tried Mandrake 9 because it seemed cutting edge but a little better managed, and it had urpmi. However, I never quite got the hang of continually doing total system upgrades using urpmi like I did with apt-get.
That box broke while I was experimenting with Arch on a second box. I have been very pleased with Arch. It has multimedia packages with risky codecs in its main repos, it is fast, and it is simple. I have been able to use pacman to do system upgrades with no adverse situations for over half a year now – knock on wood. And it is very cutting edge with KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.8. However, it does take a while to fully install and configure a desktop.
Meanwhile, I fixed the Mandrake box, and the CD upgrade to Mdk 10 went great. But Arch has spoiled me! I dont know whether to upgrade to download 5 isos to upgrade to 10.1 or do a minimal Arch install and just fetch what I need using the very efficient pacman.
I’ve ordered the Ubuntu CD, and eagerly await it’s arrival. By all the reviews and screenshots, it looks like a smooth, easy, promising distro. I’m trying it because I like trying different distros, and Ubuntu features Gnome 2.8.
However, I doubt very seriously that it will be my “main” distro. For me, Ubuntu is far too stripped down, with too few packages installed by default. Yes, you can easily get everything you want with apt-get/Synaptic. But that takes a lot of time with a broadband connection, and takes eons with dial up (which I have at home).
Personally, I love a distro that packages a lot with it’s installation CDs or DVD, so that I can get most of the stuff I want instantly and easily. I also like choice. I like to be able to switch between KDE and Gnome, between Konqueror, Mozilla, Firefox and Epiphany, between OpenOffice and KOffice (and Abiword and Gnumeric), between QT designer and Glade, between GEdit, Kate, KWrite, XEmacs, so on and so forth.
This is part of the appeal (for me) of Linux and open source – so many goodies to play with.
So I don’t agree with the latest fad of having stripped down distros, with limited default package selection, and “sane” defaults, all in the name of “making it easy for Joe SixPack”. Having simple defaults is a good thing, but just give me instant access to all my Linux goodies, and I’ll be a happy camper. Mandrake does this. 😉
Don;t flog me to death over this, but I use Mandrake 10, and tried out Linspire, and loved it. I know it’s ridiculed in the Linuc world, because it isn’t like the other Linuces, but I don’t consider it Linux.
As for Linux, the ease of use of Mandrake is what made me attracted to Linux, the onyl thing that does everything Mandrake does, and equal or better, is SuSe. (IMHO of course)
When I get my new PC, I’m getting SuSe 9.2. And, be objective and check out Linspire 5 when it is released this winter. At least check it out, it’s not like it’s Microsoft…
I think it’s funny that you praise Linspire for “touching all the packages”. My first expirience with gnu/Linux was Red Hat, and i hated how everything was Red Hat branded. Then I tried Mandrake, and i though it was better. Finally i settled with Slack, which pretty much alters nothing.
Messing with the packages is OK if you’re only going to use the packages the vendor wants you to use, but the minute you try to compile the source of anything, you’re gonna be pretty pissed that your vendor messed with your packages.
What i’d like to see is a one-cd distro that basically has everything Ubuntu has, and then an extra cd (or two) that has lot of “goodies” i probably wouldn’t use the goodie CD myself, but at least that way everybody can have everything they want.
I agree with most of the comments, but i think that you have switched in the best mandrake cycle. I’m a mandrake user since mdk 6. And those versions were unstable, but now (since january)i use the cooker version that is supposed to be unstable and it works fine with me. Most of files i download the src.rpm make my own optimizations (mtune and other patch’s) and then install, and i’m also in the bleeding edge.
I think that since February this month mandrake is getting better but is still a long way to go.
I love apt system, in that i support you; you want stability use Freebsd 4x is the system of server, and that is stable.
“Ubuntu is the future of the gnu/linux desktop.”
Wrong. Corporate backed Linux is the future of Linux outside of the geek-adotion-sphere. This pretty much narrows it down to RH and SuSE. I don’t consider Lycoris, Lindows, etc… as serious business – I spend more money pounding booze on a fun weekend than the five developers of Lycoris have for their living all together, uups, sorry mates… they’ll be out of the game in the long run.
This is not to start an argument about whether any distro may or may not be better than the other, but you need money for market penetration. Novell, for example, has it and others won’t ever have any. Easy.
May I suggest you do a network upgrade installation of MDK 10.1 over the internet? This would seem to fulfill your requirements.
Upgrading the whole distro via urpmi is perfectly possible, but there are occasional hiccups to work around (going from 10.0 to 10.1, for instance, you have to forcibly copy a new version of kdmrc over the old one if you use KDM as the login manager, and change kernel parameters if you want to switch from devfs to udev).
Doing an incremental upgrade from a rolling source (like Cooker) with urpmi is easy; simply:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi –auto-select -v
i agree with Mike on the Slackware decision, i too was once a redhat user, sure redhat is a decent enough distro, but redhat’s development tools just like mandrake & probably SuSE too, (RPM based distros) have their gcc compiler so you can only compile src.rpm and so if you want to use something from the source of the souce (no pun intended) then your out of luck, but with Slackware you will get some exellent results compiling from source, sometimes you might have to symlink a few things from /local to /usr but that is trivial compared to the disappointment i have had with RPM based distros…
but not to kick too much sand in the face of rpm based distros they are decent enough for users, and they are usually what i reccomend to newbies & first time Linux users, plus i tell em once you become familier enough with Linux to tweak it good you can try other distros that may better suit your taste, because Linux is a tasty penguin – yummy yummy yummy…
HappyTrails :^)
After running various linux distrobutions I tried slackware and found it to be most clean one. Everything is very basic and clear. It also seem to be a close to the edge of new technology, fast *and* very stable.
Just the “pure and clean” of everything, clear, basic structure, and because of that easy to customise, fix, setup…whatever.
I think mandrake is a little to customized out of the boz and a bit messy.
RPM based distros) have their gcc compiler so you can only compile src.rpm and so if you want to use something from the source of the souce (no pun intended) then your out of luck,
What does this has the gcc compiler to do with *?src.rpm?
I don’t really get it. With Mandrake you can do pretty much the same as with Libranet. You don’t *have* to upgrade every 6 months. You can edit config files. There isn’t much difference in any distribution for all that. The difference is the installer, the included packages, and the config tools. Apart from that, it doesn’t really matter which distro you’re using (except heavily customized ones like Xandros or Lindows, which makes it difficult to use software not provided by the distributer).
Ubuntu is corporate backed, go check the information at the website. So stating that it wont be the future because of the lack of said thing is stupid. Ubuntu has financial backing, and the developers that are working on it are Debian and Gnome developers that know what they are doing.
Ubuntu may not be the future of Linux, but we can hope. I know I started using Linux regularly when I bought my first copy of RH 5.2. Since then I’ve used RH, Mandrake, SuSE, Slack, Debian , and Gento, and I can honestly say that Ubuntu is the best distro I have ever had the pleasure of installing and using on my system.
I have compiled from source all the time. You do realise that a src.rpm is just an rpm with a tar.gz source file (usually pristine sources), maybe a few patches, and a spec file. When compiling, it does what you would do when using configure; make; make install. Only it is automated. If you cannot compile the tar.gz source file, then you cannot compile the src.rpm. So you are very much mistaken.
As long as you have a compiler you can build everything from scrap.I switched back to SuSE from Slackware because Slack
didn’t support SATA HD’s at all.It’s childs play to realize
a RAID0 configuration on SUSE, which is a real performance gain.Somewhere in the void between the distributions i made merry with Debian, which is a great distro that has an exeptional good package manager.As long as i can afford to buy a distro with great hardware support SuSE will be my
running mate.SuSE is compiled for i586 (pentium) and doesn’t run that slick in its freshly installed state.However after throwing every module out i don’t need and changing some options in the nvidia driver os-registry.c file,SuSE9.1 is suddenly a great deal more responsive.However Debian has made an impact and will stay in memory,continously i try to make a reason for formatting and starting all over again with Debian.Can’t find one though.I rip dvd’s and watch my (bought) dvd’s, i try to learn linux assembly.Well i know i can allways go back home to Debian if SuSE would fuck up the coming releases.Till then everything just works and i’m still on track having with the fortunately infinite Linux curve.
I hope I’m not out of the discussion but… why all this discussion about distros?
My main problem with Linux is lack of professional quality apps, not the way the system is packaged.
Photoshop is a lot faster and filled with features than gimp, there’s no serious IM client offering video *and* widespread (like msn messenger), no really comparable office suite (OpenOffice is good, but it has got loads of shortcomings, not to mention the fact that the Windows version is twice as fast…); still easy&ready tool do normal-under-windows things like easily acquire video from your videocam and point & click to work on it…
And, sorry for all the programming only geekies, still a tiny fraction games runs under Linux…
So, while I love Linux (and eagerly await the new dbus technology offering finally usb plug and play and desktop notification), I have resorted to WinXPPro, and live happily with that, despite all its shortcomings (heavy multitasking is hell…) it’s a great everyday platform.
I’ll move back to beloved Linux not when the perfect distro comes out, but when there will be a good number of high quality end-user applications.
Then, Mandrake/Ubuntu/Suse/Whatever won’t matter, as long as my system runs and I can do what I need with it.
But maybe I’m wrong!
I noticed that Knoppix 3.6 has both apt and rpm package managers. Also you can install it to the harddrive. Great Disk. Is originally a Live CD.
er, what? Every RPM distro includes a fully working compiler. You can build from source tarballs with no problems on MDK, SuSE and Fedora. Quit talking rubbish.
(not on topic but as Rex asked about this:)
(for example, DVD codecs) I have much difficulty finding apt sources for some of those applications.
Besides of Marillat that someone already mentioned above, I recommend to take a look at http://www.apt-get.org/
You can find pretty much every non-official piece of software available as Debian packages by browsing that list of unofficial Debian repositories.
Another source for unofficial Sid/Unstable multimedia and other stuff is also http://www.rarewares.org/debian.html
I would still recommend Mandrake to beginners, but for intermediate users and higher I definitely suggest Debian, especially with the new Debian installer.
I agree. Mandrake has always been a very good distribution for Linux newbies (very easy but enough of a learning experience too as it’s not just copying MS Windows like some other easy distros do). But I think that experienced users might often find better alternatives from the multitude of distributions.
Sorry for the empty space – pressed “enter” for a while without noticing.
Um, possibly because this was an article about switching Linux distributions? Just a wild guess, there.
BTW, gaim-vv supports video and voice on MSN and Yahoo. http://gaim-vv.sourceforge.net/
The distro does make quite a difference – especially since that normally decides the package manager which is a big issue. Personally I don’t really like RPM; hence I chose a non-rpm distro.
Plus the desktop environment is an issue too; if you swap from Mandrake/SuSE (RPM & KDE) to Ubuntu (deb and Gnome) there’s a pretty huge change.
Photoshop: Come on. Most users do not need it. I don’t use it under Windows because it’s too damn slow; I don’t feel like waiting for 20 seconds on a 2.4GHz machine to load the thing. I’ve got PSP instead; it’s far from as powerful but at least when I double click on a jpeg I’m looking at it a couple of seconds later.
Sure, for some users this is a big issue; but they’re a minority.
IM client: This is a sore spot for me, because I think Trillian is supreme and it doesn’t want to work for me via Wine. So I’m surviving with Kopete.
But MSN Messenger is *NOT* a good client. I can’t be signed in with multiple accounts – which is a pain. Yes, I have a second MSN account for work; so if I set my personal one to “the boss is an asshole” he doesn’t see it 😉
Video…. I’ve just installed Gnome-Meeting which seems okay so far. I don’t have a webcam though so I can’t comment on that side of it, other than the fact that it does do it.
I’m not that huge a fan of OOo, but it works, and doesn’t give me viruses from jpegs. That’s acceptable to me.
Okay, games aren’t good… I’m running Doom3 happily though, and faster than under Windows. I prefer UT2003/4 under Linux; they render slower but they’re more responsive – Windows thrashes the hdd at the slightest excuse.
This is hardly an average user type scenario, but I was compiling kdebluetooth and recompiling my kernel simultaneously last night (I forgot the first one hadn’t finished when I typed ‘make’) and while things were a bit slower the system was very usable.
At work yesterday I got IIS to execute a database query that took 30-odd seconds to complete. During this period Windows was _totally_ unresponsive – mouse jumping 50 pixels at a time etc. Yeah it was hell, and hardly even multitasking 😉
but I was not aware of the fact that the Mandrake people actually enter your house to force you at gun point to upgrade.
They don’t? So why didn’t the auther simply not upgrade if he didn’t want to?
What Eu said!
I, too, have had great luck with Mandrake, and know a number of people who use it for servers, desktops, and whatever else.
I strongly disagree with annymous’s assesment that Red Hat and SuSE carry more wieght on the linux desktop because they are backed by a company.
First of all, let me be clear that “linux desktop” means “everyday user’s desktop”. You talk about Red Hat, but “Red Hat Linux” is not going to be on any normal person’s desktop, Red Hat’s everyday user distro is called “Fedora”, which i am not very impressed by.
Also, unless Novell takes SuSE in a different direction than it was currently going, it will not be the everyday user distro either.
First of all: It’s not Free! If you download SuSE from a torrent or something, that’s called copyright infringement, a phenomenon that linux users are not supposed to encounter. SuSE used to provide an FTP install gratis, but i don’t think that’s good enough for Joe Idiot.
Second: It’s not Free! SuSE contains code who’s license is incompatible with the GPL. It’s possible Novell will open that code down the line, but currently, SuSE is not a Free OS in any sense of the word.
You might say Joe Idiot doesn’t care about software lisences, and you might have a point, but he does care about price and freedom. If Joe Stupid can’t legally burn a copy of SuSE and legally give it to Joe Idiot, Joe Idiot probably won’t install SuSE.
Meanwhile, Ubuntu is totally free, and completely free. Also, Joe Idiot doesn’t have to ask his friend Joe Stupid because Ubuntu’s Corporate Sponser is distributing CDs free of charge.
I repeat my statement: Ubuntu is the Future of the Linux Desktop.
Mike
MDK supports GNOME and KDE equally. You can choose to install either, both or neither (if you choose neither you can run from the console or run XFce, icewm, blackbox, WindowMaker or any of the other tens of window managers / DEs that Mandrake packages). KDE is the default, but then, something has to be. SuSE aims to be the same but in reality their GNOME packaging still isn’t quite up to scratch – apparently it’s improving, though.
Why the heck do you like Trillian? It’s good for Windows, I guess, and I liked it at first, but it’s getting almost as bad as the proprietary clients now – bloated and uses an inexplicable non-standard interface by default. gaim does everything I need, I run gaim on Windows when I have to use Windows…
“Second: It’s not Free! SuSE contains code who’s license is incompatible with the GPL. It’s possible Novell will open that code down the line, but currently, SuSE is not a Free OS in any sense of the word.”
What code would that be, then?
So if Mandrake is the best thing after sliced salami, why do you read everywhere: “my first distro was Mandrake, but then I moved to…”
i used mandrake (bought a couple box sets and everything) until i paid for the stupid club. i think my year long membership is still active, but it was such a waste that i only used it once or twice.
finally i switched to gentoo, and haven’t looked back since.
it was great as a beginners distro, but once i got my feet wet, i got tired of it, so i agree with the author on this one.
Greetings,
As far as I remember, Yast used not to be free software, which made SuSE non-free indeed.
It changed when Novell bought them, if I remember correctly, so the argument is moot now (kind of like the Qt licensing issues of yore).
Cheers.
“Ubuntu is the future of the gnu/linux desktop.”
Wrong. Corporate backed Linux is the future of Linux outside of the geek-adotion-sphere.
Uhmm…Mark Shuttleworth has very deep pockets who can afford to burn through a few million before he has to turn a buck. Besides, Gnome is the future of the corporate desktop and Ubuntu is a very stable, polished Gnome distro.
because people tend to get the idea that Mandrake is somehow a ‘newbie distro’ and other distros have super-l33t features that somehow don’t exist on Mandrake. Which isn’t true, but hey.
It is the newbies that think that running Gentoo or Debian confers upon them some degree of knowledge and elitism that it just isn’t possible when things just work. It is these idiots that install every release candidate not for testing purposes, but because they have to have the latest point release of whatever software and then go and complain.
Addionally, the Mandrake Security model, through mandrakesec is one of the most sophisticated and easiest to use. But hey, why talk about substantive issues when you can just continue to live in your self-deluded world?
19:06:53 up 57 days, 1:50, 4 users, load average: 0.33, 0.46, 0.52
Sorry, but I am still unconvinced.
Example: I am a regular of ExtremeTech.
A user regarded by everybody as very knowledgeable had been using Mandrake for years and he would swear by it.
Then, to our amazement, all of a sudden he switched to Gentoo.
Another one there, with 20 years of Unix/Linux experience, has only good things to say about Mandrake. But when it comes to recommending a distro it is always Libranet or MEPIS.
I would love to meet these users with 20 years of Unix experience that spend time at extremetech. Give me a break!
But anyway, listen, I don’t give a shit what you or anyone runs, so long as it is Linux.
But if you were to be honest with yourself, you would pick up the latest Mandrake Release and run it for at least a month so that you could both understand it and talk from experience, rather than referring to all these putative users that are fleeing to other distributions. Mandrake is the most popular distribution in distrowatch and is very fast and stable. Those are the facts.
See my reply to AdamW.
The people I mentioned can hardly be defined as “idiots who live in a self deluded world”
They are IT professionals kept in very high esteem by everybody.
“But if you were to be honest with yourself, you would pick up the latest Mandrake Release and run it for at least a month so that you could both understand it and talk from experience, rather than referring to all these putative users that are fleeing to other distributions. Mandrake is the most popular distribution in distrowatch and is very fast and stable. Those are the facts.”
As I have already said Mandrake was my first distro and I check *every* new release (at least when it is released to the general public).
It fails to convince me every time, and the reasons are many.
Well, ok, Mandrake is certainly not just a newbie distro. Mandrake is used in many serious purposes too from workstations to servers. Also good proof of the quality of the Mandrakesoft team is the recent deal that they got to develop a very secure Linux distribution for the French government.
However, Mandrake is quite far from being the perfect Linux distribution for everything. Mandrake is perhaps more than any other distro a Swiss knife type of distribution trying to serve everyone and every task as good as it can. A Swiss knife, even if a good one, is only good for what a Swiss knife is good for.
It is not so easy to be a competitive Linux distribution these days when Distrowatch lists 344 distros (excluding some very specialized ones) plus 77 more on the waiting list. Mandrake hasn’t managed to be exceptionally good in any single thing lately (except maybe that Swiss knife thing). Besides, we know that some MDK releases have been quite buggy in the past – maybe because Mandrakesoft has just had too much hurry with everything they’ve tried to accomplish.
If you want to have a good and secure server distro, you can easily find many good and even dedicated alternatives these days. Why then choose Mandrake? If you want to have an easy to use distro a bit like MS Windows, at least Linspire or Xandros are probably easier than Mandrake. If you’re a geek and want to have more control, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch etc. are designed to serve your geeky needs.
If I really wanted to have a nice looking Swiss knife distro, Mandrake might still be quite a good choice. But where would I need a Swiss knife is another question?
I don’t agree with your characterization, but does it occur to you that some people may like the idea of keeping a uniform Linux environment to ease maintenance. That means that you don’t have to rewrite your scripts because the location of certain files changes from one distro to another, among many other things…
And to drive a knife into the heart of your analogy, i will say that you are installing Linux and thus you are in control. Mandrake does and installs what you tell it to do and install.
switching to gentoo I can understand, as gentoo has a viable niche – building from source in a slightly less masochistic way than LFS. You can sort of turn Mandrake into a frankenstein Gentoo but there’s really not much point. But frankly, the build-from-source niche isn’t very large. If it’s the way you want to go, then fine! Gentoo makes more sense than Mandrake.
No matter what Mark does or thinks he did the best pollished distro ever in linux history.
It is inimaginable how clean it can be.
My sister doesnt know linux, she doesnt know windows too good either, just a click here one there, a paste in msword or some inserts in access.
When she saw my desktop she got verry pleased, including the feeling that /home/user_name is really hers and what she does there its up to her only and that that is the place where she can store her papers, her documents, her pictures.
I do not say that these features where not present on linux, but Ubuntu really managed to bring the all together.
I wait until she sees Synaptic
Yeah, Mandrake may fit many persons perfectly. I didn’t say that it wouldn’t, did I? And it does occur to me that that some people may like the idea of keeping a uniform Linux environment to ease maintenance. I agree.
There’s just more and more competition these days in the Linux land. Lots of people see that also the uniform Linux environment they might want and need is something else than Mandrake (Slackware, CRUX, Redhat, Xandros, Debian, DeLi, Arch, Lunar, Gentoo, Sourcemage, Yoper, ROCK, Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, Libranet,… – you name it).
It is not just that some newer or more geeky distro may have a particularly l33t aura, more than the good old Mandrake, but that not everyone prefers or needs the same tools. And in really serious work you often just prefer very specialized tools (like OpenBSD or SELinux for extra security). That’s what I meant with the Swiss knife analogy.
That’s really cool iongion. Ubuntu is damn close to the gnu/linux we’ve been promised for so long.
I think people take their affairs with Linux and its distributions a little too personally. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but is it really pertinent to publicly confess your switch from one Linux distribution to another? Congratulations on your switch, however. I hope we don’t begin to see an influx of switch stories on osnews. I haven’t yet gotten over the Mac switch stories.
I always find lots of people in these discussions saying “I switched from distribution X to distribution Y…” Guess what? X is never Debian.
The point: Once you try Debian, you won’t try any other distro. As easy as that
take a look at http://www.mandrakeusers.org
there are some great, unofficial forums there,
the members are really friendly and helpful, and the community is becoming massive.
iphitus
That is very interesting how I am aa former Mandrake user. I am now using Slackware. Why is it that I and the author switched. I did it to get the abilty to customize what i would like.
Yeah, I know you can get Gnome in Mandrake too – I was really using the default as an example of how distros differ.
Trillian is approved of because I like it. Bit of a circular reason… I just feel it’s doing what I want when I use it. Whereas gaim is a total nightmare – the connection status is inexplicably hidden under a menu somewhere – which is a real pain if, say, no-one’s online – is that because I’m not connected, or just that everyone else has something better to do?
Gaim’s interface is also somewhat non-standard under KDE – although far from as different as Trillian is.
And we shall avoid the nightmare that silc “support” in gaim caused – every time I signed on I’d be confronted by a plethora of messages about people not being online and keys not being trusted. I know nobody else supports silc, but hey.
I think I shall leave that there – it’s pretty OT by now and frankly you don’t stand a chance of changing my mind – I simply don’t like the feel of gaim at all, it rubs me the wrong way just about everywhere, whereas Trillian just seems to do what I want.
“But anyway, listen, I don’t give a shit what you or anyone runs, so long as it is Linux.
“…so long as it is Linux”. Yep that about sums up your idiot fanboy mentality
heh, I always have myself on my own contact list; that way I know if I’m online. I never came across any issues with silc support like that, dunno what I did right and you did wrong…
@lumbergh: I think you interpreted that in the nastiest way possible intentionally. Eu’s intention was more “I think Linux is the best OS and I think pretty much all distributions of it are equally good”.
oh, and BTW, I tried Debian once, and went back to Mandrake. It’s a fine distro, but…I still like Mandrake.
I’ll go by what he wrote and not try to read his mind for his intentions.
I don’t care if you’re running whatever came with the Vic 20.
Yes, have found Eu to be one of the more articulate/intelligent individuals around here – he usually provides a well-balanced counter-point in these discussions.
I too made the switch from mandrake to Debian. First to Knoppix then to Debian Sid proper. What i got tired of was depency hell in Mandrake. I never liked their package system. urpmi never worked for me and i’d always end up installing packages on Mandrake through kpkg, checking failed dependencies, then going on a treasure hunt for odd-as-two-dollar-bill mandrake rpms that would sometimes bork other packages and on rare occasions the entire system. I love Debian and the apt-get system. Installing and upgrading packages is a snap. I also like being able to install a system from the ground up, and put there only the programs i want. At teh time mandrake was a good introduction to linux, but now with all the Debian variants out there like knoppix and ubuntu it’s not like anyone needs to use mandrake as a stepping stone.
then you were doing it wrong, period. urpmi does everything apt-get does. There’s no such thing as ‘odd-as-two-dollar-bills mandrake rpms’ – there’s rpms from different versions and third-party rpms, but if you go installing those you’ve only got yourself to blame.
PEBKAC. sorry.
I started on Linux in 1998 with Mandrake 6.5. I would always try out other distros more out general curiousity. I was loyal to Mandrake for so long only because it opened a new chapter in computing for me. After dealing with Mandrakes quirks like being a bit to slow compared to the others and some crashes of the programs. I hanged in there hoping they would address these issues. However I got tired of waiting then the curiousity of other distros started to turn into a switch. I too found Debian and find it more mature and faster. I liked urpmi but love apt-get. Updating everything is a joke. Using the new Debian netinstall of unstable is also a joke to get pure debian on there.Part of me misses my old friend the one that helped me wean off. I always will have a soft spot for you thank you but I had to leave because we grew apart.
>> I always find lots of people in these discussions saying “I switched from >> distribution X to distribution Y…” Guess what? X is never Debian.
>>
>> The point: Once you try Debian, you won’t try any other distro. As easy as >> that
Well actually…
I first started using Linux back in ’94 Red Hat Linux 4.0 IIRC, I then moved to 5.2, Mandrake, SUSE, then Debian, I stayed with Debian for years then got sick and tired of waiting for Woody to go stable so I went back to Red Hat (so I spose you are wrong), I then stayed with Red Hat until Fedora Core 1 then I went back to Debian (I’ve used Gentoo and Slackware on various boxes over this time too), stayed with Unstable for a while, got sick of all the cyclic dependency errors and I went back to Fedora didn’t like it so I deleted it and now that box has Mandrakelinux 10 Official on it. So I spose you’re just wrong? Mandrakelinux 10 Official is a great distro, easy to use, and just works, but I’m old and lazy now and don’t need leet points for using Debian/Gentoo. Maybe that’s why the Linux box is a secondary box now and my main machines are all OS X. Mmmm being lazy rocks!
urpmi does everything apt-get does.
Can you make a local repository with urpmi?
>> Can you make a local repository with urpmi?
Quoting the urpmi man page:
urpmi authorizes well-known rpms (or rpm files) to be installed includ-
ing all their dependencies. You can use it to install source package
dependencies or source package itself.
You can compare rpm vs. urpmi with insmod vs. modprobe or dpkg vs apt-get
<snip>
Note that urpmi handle installations from various medias (ftp, http,
local and nfs volumes, removable medias such as CDROMs) and is able to
install dependencies from a media different from the package’s media.
If necessary, urpmi asks you to insert the required media.
“…so long as it is Linux”. Yep that about sums up your idiot fanboy mentality”
Not that about sums up your viciousness and your bigotry for anyone who thinks differently from you.
Do I think that Linux will open the door to the information age for tons of people that have never yet been on the Internet? You bet, I have seen it happen, I have made it happen.
Do I care about Linux in a way that I do not about Windows or other proprietary OS? You bettcha, I value the way it has been developed through collaboration and it speaks volumes of the people involved in all the different projects that make possible to put together a GNU/Linux/KDE/Gnome (add your acronym favorite acronym) system.
Does it make you feel better to be a tepid man of no passions? Do you have some sort of Victorian-era hang-up that makes you believe that a passionate person cannot be reasonable and make informed choices?
Funny, your tone just about says it all. You must be fun to hang around with.
Hi,
As someone said Mandrake is like a swiss army knife and doesn’t excel
at anything.
I repeat !
Mandrake is jack of all trades ,master of none.
Mandrake is very painful if you want to install softwares from source.
Especially things which have been included in Mandrake becuase they tend to put files in non standard location.
Redhat too suffers from this but to a lesser extent.
But redhat is STABLE !! (I’m taling about redhat 7.x/8/9 )
It has never crashed on me.But Mandrake left me with a bad taste in the mouth.
Next.I don’t like the look of mandrake.(Personal preference and easy to change the look i suppose).
At last i have found my refuge in Slackware.
Simple,clean,stable and damn easier than you think.
And compiling from source has worked everytime since slackware uses standard locations.
(I run the latest XFCE,X.org 6.8.1 and gcc version 3.4.2.All compiled from source.)
I’m installing ubuntu on a friend’s computer today erasing Mandrake 10
“Especially things which have been included in Mandrake becuase they tend to put files in non standard location.”
What in God’s name are you talking about? Mandrake is LSB-certified.
Please pray tell us which files are on a non-standard location and while you are at it, please define and provide references and links to the standard to which you are referring.
Or do you people just make up bullshit as you go?
Do I think that Linux will open the door to the information age for tons of people that have never yet been on the Internet? You bet, I have seen it happen, I have made it happen.
Oh yeah, I mean without Linux the door to the information age and the internet is closed to people. What exactly have you “made happen”?
Do I care about Linux in a way that I do not about Windows or other proprietary OS? You bettcha, I value the way it has been developed through collaboration and it speaks volumes of the people involved in all the different projects that make possible to put together a GNU/Linux/KDE/Gnome (add your acronym favorite acronym) system.
Why of course we all know that Linux/KDE/Gnome is the only software that is developed through collaboration. On the other hand Gates hacked the NT codebase solo in his basement at night after long days of stealing food from hungry children and other assorted crusades against freedom.
Does it make you feel better to be a tepid man of no passions? Do you have some sort of Victorian-era hang-up that makes you believe that a passionate person cannot be reasonable and make informed choices?
Funny, your tone just about says it all. You must be fun to hang around with.
I’m sure you are the life of the party – shoving Linux CDs down people’s throats, putting together impromptu indoctrination sessions on how Linux = freedom, and constantly correcting people that it’s “GNU/Linux” not “Linux”.
Which mailing list are you talking about ? I did not see that on the official mailing lists… They are moderated, as well as the IRC channels.
Can you make a local repository with urpmi?
Yes, local, distant (HTTP, FTP, NFS) or on removable media. You can also make your own urpmi repository for others, generating hdlist files necessary for urpmi. There are a lot of sites offering them.
“….Do I think that Linux will open the door to the information age for tons of people that have never yet been on the Internet? You bet, I have seen it happen, I have made it happen. ”
>>Oh yeah, I mean without Linux the door to the information age and the internet is closed to people. What exactly have you “made happen”? <<
Well, you asked. I have built computer labs for disadvantaged people in the US and abroad, which would have not been economically viable to do with proprietary technologies. What we did with donated hardware at zero cost and our volunteer effort would have been impossible in any other way. These computer labs have had life changing effects on the communities that use them.
>>> Why of course we all know that Linux/KDE/Gnome is the only software that is developed through collaboration. On the other hand Gates hacked the NT codebase solo in his basement at night after long days of stealing food from hungry children and other assorted crusades against freedom. <<<
Well, if you mean to tell me that the people working at Microsoft are experiencing collaboration in the way that open source makes possible and that they are building exactly the software they would like to be building, you must not have ever worked at Microsoft or know someone who has.
As for Linux advocacy, I do none. People flock to the doors of our user group because we have a reputation for building awesome technology solutions for people. I do work with a Linux users group and we have more requests for help than we can cope with. Collectively, we have migrated 3500 systems in this year.
Having said all of the above, what’s your real beef? What bothers you so much about people who want to use software that places no restrictions on what they can do with the software?
I am talking about the newbie list I was reading at that time. And I actually quit using Mandrake right after the “liberation” of the Iraqui people.
So maybe it cooled a little after that. Maybe they started moderating the list in such a way as to throw out more OT posts – as I said I haven’t been there for a while.
That was just the reason I personally quit. Maybe one time I will have a look again (after all I still have shares of Mandrake) and then see for myself if it’s different – but actually I am happy where I am now.
Having said all of the above, what’s your real beef? What bothers you so much about people who want to use software that places no restrictions on what they can do with the software
Hehe, you are the one that said “I don’t give a shit what you or anyone runs, so long as it is Linux”. So it appears you are the one that has a beef with personal choice. If I had a beef with free software than I wouldn’t be running Ubuntu right now as I type this.
Well, I meant that in jester more than anything else as a way of saying that all this my-distro-your-distro is fairly silly.
I guess I should have put a smiley at the end of that statement. Giving people the benefit of the doubt would be a great first step to bring civility to these forums. Not saying that I am not as guilty of jumping the gun as anyone else. Oh well, I’ll work on my phrasing of things
But you have to admit that this thread is full of trolls spreading lies about Mandrake that it makes your head spin:
1) Mandrake doesn’t allow you to install from source.
2) Mandrake cannot be tweaked.
3) Mandrake does not put files in standard locations.
4) Mandrake is too bleeding edge.
5) Mandrake is not bleeding ege enough.
6) Mandrake killed my dog and set my house on fire, I swear.
I mean, come on, those people got to give it a rest.
Finally, I think Ubuntu just saved Debian and Gnome from irrelevance. They are the best Gnome-based distribution around and they have managed to make plenty of new debian users from people who may have otherwise not used debian. But I still think that it has some teething to do in terms of hardware detection. For instance, it doesn’t handle my Matrox G550 card all that well, unless I manually edit the config file, which is fine, but not in line with its assumed target audience.
Regarding Mandrake…
Mandrake, either 7.0 or 7.1, was the first distro that I installed that seemed “to just work” out of the box for me. It picked up my sound card and ethernet card on my old thinkpad and was ready to roll after install.
Then I believe it was around 7.2 that things got somewhat borked. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but the whole distro seemed to slip a notch in quality while others continued to rise.
I can’t comment on anything after 7.2, since I haven’t tried it. If I was going to recommend a KDE-centric distro then Mandrake would certainly be up there.
Regarding Ubuntu, Debian, Gnome….
Finally, I think Ubuntu just saved Debian and Gnome from irrelevance
Debian is the big meta-distro these days, so it’s just about the opposite of “irrelevance”. The biggest distro on the planet, RedHat, is Gnome, and the pre-release tidbits of NLD show that Novell (the second biggest distro maker with the acquisition of SuSE) is becoming Gnome-centric, so I don’t know where you get the idea that Ubuntu saved Gnome from irrelevance.
Which list exactly ? (address, please). You may find the archives there :
http://archives.mandrakelinux.com/newbie
and there is no mention of political discussions there (or am I missing them?) Moreover, a “spring cleaning” of the addresses has been done in September.
Unfortunately, this summer’s archives are missing indeed… But since September, the list is on topic.
I run a few Debian servers, but until Ubuntu, there just wasn’t a debian-based distribution that I enjoyed on the desktop and I have tried Libranet, Linspire and Debian proper.
As far as Gnome, I think the gnome crew at Suse is a huge PR nightmare. They have too big a mouth and have already ruined a huge desktop deployment in Spain. I am speaking a little too much here, but I have inside knowledge into that one deployment and the folks at one particular government administration wanted to use Suse/KDE, but hit some sort of brickwall because the people speaking to them on behalf of Novell insisted that it had to be Suse/Gnome.
In the end, this local administration ended up borrowing the work that another regional government had done in developing Linex.org (a Debian based distribution) instead of going with Suse because they found the Gnome people to be “childish and incompetent”. Those are not my words.
Specifically, Miguel de Icaza said at a meeting in a University in Barcelona that KDE was like a no-brand ham, whereas Gnome was “Jabugo” ham, a local delicacy known to be very refined and expensive. In other words, he called KDE a “Yugo” and Gnome a “Ferrari”. And this was not just once, but repeatedly. On top of all this, he badmouthed Richard Stallman for a good 20 minutes, a very esteemed figure in Spain, and a personal friend of one of the decision-makers in the audience. To top it off, Miguel’s presentation was a bit too self-indulgent and showed lack of preparation. This basically just killed the deal.
Many of the people involved in this deal had a good chunk of respect for Miguel as he had previously testified before the Spanish Congress and had given a very impressive performance. I say this so that you can gauge the extent to which Miguel’s statements were damaging, managing to undo much of his prior work and record. And sadly, he didn’t to even realize it or get it. Either from overt confidence or maybe he was just jet-lagged. I know that someone made a video of the event, but i don’t really know where that might be.
In any case, the Gnome people are fighting an internal turf battle with the KDE/Suse guys and they are doing so through the media, including in this site. It’s a situation that is likely to implode if Novell doesn’t get a handle on it soon. So that leaves us with Red Hat which I have never liked as a desktop distribution and I ran it for over a year on Red Hat 9. It was very stable, if a bit slow, but it didn’t exactly make a splash in any meaninful “desktop” sense.
Finally, I like Gnome’s guiding principles, but I think the underpinnings and the breadth of technologies is far better in KDE. I also find hacking in KDE much, much easier, the breadth of applications to be more encompassing and I prefer the look of KDe applications, but that’s a personal thing. Other than that, I could not live without a tool like kiosk for managing tons of desktops and Gnome doesn’t offer anything remotely similar right now (Gconf doesn’t cut it by a thousand-miles and neither does Sun’s java tool or that is a step in the right direction).
But I don’t want this to be another KDE vs. Gnome thread. So I am just letting you know where I am coming from.
Isn’t it possible to let both gnome and kde coexist in the coming releases of SuSE and let the user decide for themself?
You guys have forgotten to discuss Libranet a bit. Older distro that’s been aorund a while and easy to use and not limited to Gnome like Ubuntu. Plus there’s only 2 people making and selling it.
There is no Gnome crew at Suse. It’s the Gnome crew at Ximian.
I’m happy to see Miguel bad-mouth Stallman. I do it every chance I can get.
Comparing KDE to a Yugo and Gnome to a Ferrari is stupid. I agree that KDE is technically better than Gnome (even though the gap is closing).
KDE will be optional on the Novell linux DVD in the future, but Novell has already decided that it’s desktop offerings will be Gnome-centric. I think this is good. I want one desktop to be dominant.
Gnome is in desperate need of something like Kdevelop. Anjuta is pretty much dead in the water.
Indeed!
And it it is truly Debian compatible out of the box.
Ubuntu can be made Debian compatible, but it is a lot of work and can be done only by experienced users.
That was fascinating. Sorry thing to have turf wars like that.
Of all distros, it seems that Mandrake does the best job of supporting both KDE and Gnome more or less equally. This is in terms of making both work well, and adding their own themes to both.
Red Hat is very Gnome centric – KDE is fine in Red Hat, but almost an after-thought. It’s tweaked to look like Gnome (or both are tweaked to the Bluecurve theme – not necessarily a bad idea, but I like having KDE and Gnome distinct)
SuSE is very KDE centric. It supports KDE very well but does a sub par job of supporting Gnome. I’ve read about lot’s of show stopping bugs in their Gnome implementation.
Ubuntu is Gnome only (although you can apt-get KDE).
Linspire, Lycoris, Xandros, Mepis, and Knoppix are all KDE only. Supposedly, you can apt-get Gnome with these, but with mixed results.
Then finally, Libranet seems to be the only other distro (besides Mandrake) that supports KDE and Gnome equally. And it seems that Libranet is also an outstanding distro, which I’m eager to try! 🙂
Finally, I somewhat agree with the analogy that Mandrake is a “Swiss Army Knife” distro, or a “Jack of all trades, master of none”, but with a caveat. I actually think that Mandrake is a master of many trades, such as:
* Great look and feel – IMHO, Mandrake is the best looking distro of any I’ve seen. This is all personal taste, though.
* Great hardware detection and autoconfiguration – Of all that I’ve used or read about, only Mepis or Knoppix are equal or better.
* Great add-on tools – The “Drak” tools, all organized in the Mandrake Control Center, are simply outstanding. the Mandrake Control Center is equal to, or better than SuSE’s YaST and Libranet’s Admin Tool.
* Speed – Mandrake, of all rpm distros or “newbie oriented” distros, Mandrake is one of the fastest, if not the fastest. Only perhaps Linux Guru/Geek oriented distros like pure Debian, Gentoo or Slackware can exceed Mandrake’s speed.
* Cutting edge (with stability). Mandrake 10 was the first distro to fully feature kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.2. And it’s very stable and relatively bug free.
* Outstanding package management – urpmi and RPMDrake are a dream to use, perhaps only exceeded by apt-get/Snaptic.
* Package Selection – Mandrake PowerPack has more cool packages than you could know to do with. Then through urpmi, many free Mandrake repositories provide many, many more.
* Outstanding user community – only perhaps Libranet, Mepis, Ubuntu, and pure Debian are as good.
So, in short, while not perfect, Mandrake is simply an outstanding all around distro.
sums up pretty well how i feel about mandrake also
i use debian testing here on my desktop but been meaning to try out ubuntu, been hearing good things about it so must give it a try.
im not sure if libranet comes with synaptic but im sure you could ‘apt-get install’ it. Its a gui front end for apt-get but i prefer apt-get from console, it feels faster for some reason.
>> Then I believe it was around 7.2 that things got somewhat borked. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but the whole distro seemed to slip a notch in quality while others continued to rise.
I can’t comment on anything after 7.2, since I haven’t tried it.<<
Think most observers would agree that Mandrake has improved substantially from the early 7 days – might be an idea to try 10.1 – the GNOME implementation’s ok, whilst the KDE one’s excellent – doubt it’d disappoint
How is MDK’s KDE implementation better than its GNOME implementation?
im not sure if libranet comes with synaptic
It’s included there, plus many other GUI and text based package tools too.
About Libranet package management:
There may be small problems with Libranet package management when you want to use some packages not supported by Libranet out of the box, like something a bit unusual from the Debian unstable repositories. You may end up having lots of not-so-easy-for-at-least-a-non-expert-to-fix dependency problems. That’s because Libranet uses its own Libranet archive system (= mostly fixed apt sources, preferences etc.), because that way it can more safely mix various and not always Debian-supported apt sources.
I think that the default security settings of Libranet could be slightly better too (there’s Libranet firewall, but it is not on after the installation). (BTW, does Libranet Adminmenu still need to use Telnet for some of its functionality?)