“For almost three years I have used Mandrakelinux and compared it with several other desktop distros. For ease of use, excellent support, and up-to-date packaging, Mandrake is the best desktop going.” Read the rest at NewsForge.
My workstation OS: Mandrakelinux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
For years I have used mandrake as well. Currently I am staying with 9.1 Powerpack until I see a significant improvement in mandrake, like native Wi-Wi Support. mandrake is a great distro. 🙂
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=193&slide=1
What do you mean? 10.1 and 10.2 support a wide range of wi-fi cards natively, including configuration through drakconnect. Some cards, particularly 802.11g, are still problematic, but a lot work.
I have to agree with the author. I also love Mandrake. The Mandrake control center is defenitely one of the good things, and ofcourse also urpmi.
I also like how the installer can resize ntfs partitions, and how they get detected automaticly. Thumbs up to them
yes, Mandrake is a very good distro. I won’t argue about “the best” or not the best. That would lead to a stupid flame-war.
What I missed in the article is:
a) on what hardware did he test the OS?
b) what makes Mandrake better for certain tasks than other distros? MCC alone is no reason for saying “this distro is the best”.
c) weaknesses? strengths? bug-fixing time?
It seems that the author was not even aware of the fact that MDK isos of the Official Edition are freely available for download, too, not only the Community Edition.
😉
If you like Mandrake but hate to have to download 3 CDs you should give PClinuxOS a try. They got me to switch from Ubuntu.
mandrake is better than debian or red-hat for tasks like setup
linux boxes with recent versions of software i. e. mplayer, scribus and with many urpmi sources well distibuted i.e. plf, jpackage. Distros like suse are far from it.
So it is great for linux servers, multimedia desktops, etc with very litle setup time.
Also in the server field it gives a easy security setup wich is configured very fast with a single tool and works very well right out of the box that is acomplished in other distros but with more effort.
If you like Mandrake but hate to have to download 3 CDs.
You only have to download one floppy image and you can do an ftp install. Or just the first CD will do fine.
I do understand why distro’s release a single installCD, but after that it much easier to do everything straight from ftp. Saves a shipload of useless downloads and never used CD’s.
Strange “review”. Seems like an advertisement in a way. Anyone think this is a reaction to the latest comments on Distowatch?
This is the second article I’ve seen using “workstation” when what they really ment was desktop.
I really hate to argue semantics, but if you’re not continually taxing your CPU(s) with a scientific computing, medical, 3D rendering, or other compute-heavy task which fulfills some type of job or research contact and is the primary purpose of the system, sorry, it’s not a workstation, it’s a desktop.
This is definately a advertisement for Mandrake.
Except for the fact that when I wanna upgrade Apache + Postgree it is more difficult than pressing upgrade.exe . However despite that fact of wasting 1h+ of upgrading software compared to windows, I find it very competitive against Windows + BeOS LOL!!!
This is a sad advertisement for Mandrake. The review is pointless, if you can even deem it a “review.” Sorry, but you’ve now turned me completely off Mandrake!
I agree. I am a mandrake user but this is not really a review.
What I wonder is why mandrake is getting so little momentum lately WRT to, say, ubuntu.
I think they need a new look&feel for screenshots
Mandrake may be quite ok but… Below there are a couple of quotes from a short Mandrakelinux summary from Distrowatch that have much more information value than the Mandrake article at NewsForge.
“many users found themselves running Mandrake where other distributions failed to provide the required usability.
a popular distribution among those new to Linux and among home users looking for an alternative operating system.
a highly up-to-date Linux distribution. As a trade-off, the users are likely to notice more bugs and perhaps less stability than with other distributions.
Pros: User-friendly, graphical configuration utilities, enormous community support, NTFS partition resizing.
Cons: Some releases are buggy, the releases are initially made available to MandrakeClub members only.”
(http://distrowatch.cz/dwres.php?resource=major)
Now, compare the above Distrowatch quotes to the text of the NewsForge article…
To be fair, I guess the NewForge “My OS” articles are not even meant to be very unbiased and objective OS reviews.
hmm, how is upgradeing apache+postgresql hard? elaborate please…
Did anyone check out his other article?
http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/linuxbeat3.htm
Another one of those shallow and incomplete “My Workstation OS” articles from News Forge.:(
I’ve tried a bunch of distros, including having Mandrake installed, then installing something else. But I always come back to Mandrake. I just find so many other distros to be lacking when compared to Mandrake.
Recently I’ve been on the Mepis and Ubuntu bandwagons, and I still quite like those distros. But each of these failed to deliver the overall package, and overall satisfaction I get out of Mandrake.
Mandrake is a complete distribution. It’s not a “stripped down” distro with “sane defaults”, where you have to download for hours to get the stuff you need or want. Practically everything is there already.
Mandrake is also a full featured distro. MCC is simply awesome, perhaps the best of it’s kind (only SuSE’s Yast and Libranet’s Adminmenu are comparable). Urpmi is fantastic, and frankly just as good as apt-get. In fact, I’ve had better all around luck with urpmi and the Mandrake free repositories than with apt-get. The Mandrake installer is one of the best, and the partition resizer is simply fantastic.
And Mandrakes hardware detection and auto configuration is nearly flawless.
Mandrake’s Galaxy theme is also fantastic. It’s all subjective of course, but I find the Galaxy theme the most asthetically pleasing theme in the Linux world, and I’ve tried tons of them.
Mandrake strikes a nice balance between being cutting edge and being stable. They remain very up to date, but still manage to remain stable and relatively bug free. Most user complaints about bugs were with Community or Cooker, not Official. That’s normal for any distro – betas and pre-releases always have bugs for users to report. And personally, I’ve experienced one noticable bug with Mandrake 10, and it was only a cosmetic one (package signatures). That was it.
And in spite of the fact that it seems fashionable on OSNews to bag on Mandrake (I guess it’s not “leet” enough like Arch or Slackware, or not trendy enough like Ubuntu), I think Mandrake is an excellent all around distro. Perhaps people get jealous of it’s success (number one on DistroWatch, increasing profits, great reviews, big community). Perhaps some hardcore Linux geeks think Mandrake is too easy to use. Whatever the reason, Mandrake is fantastic, regardless of the whiney posts on OSNews.
Keep up the good work, Mandrakesoft!
“This is the second article I’ve seen using “workstation” when what they really ment was desktop.
I really hate to argue semantics, but if you’re not continually taxing your CPU(s) with a scientific computing, medical, 3D rendering, or other compute-heavy task which fulfills some type of job or research contact and is the primary purpose of the system, sorry, it’s not a workstation, it’s a desktop.”
When I run MPQC (Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry) as a back end to Ghemical on my old 700 MHz Celeron running Mandrake 9.1 at home for a problem from work and then push MESA to the edge to view the 3D Molecular Orbitals does my old Desktop then miraculously turn into a Workstation?
BTW trying to run a basis set any more complicated than STO-3G requires waiting for the end of the universe.
Currently I am running Mandrake 10.1 on my primary desktop. I like its control center because it brings many things together and has excellent tools as was already mentioned. It is fast and stable. However, recently I have been taking a hard look at SimplyMepis Linux. It may lake a little of Mandrakes polish but it more than makes up for it in other ways. I have SimplyMepis on my laptop and an old box with an Athlon 500mhz in it. Both run Mepis smoother than Mandrake, and this is with Mepis running Kde 3.3 as opposed to Mandrake with 3.2.3. Further I find setting up multimedia in Mandrake to be annoying, not difficult, just bothersome. Mepis comes pre configured with the mplayer browser plugin, as well as flash and java. I realize this may be a license issue but it is refreshing to have these things ready to go right away. I have always liked Urpmi and think that there is very little difference between it and apt. Both do the job well when properly configured. I am not going to switch my desktop just yet from Mandrake as it still serves me well, but Mepis is making a strong case.
One thing that seems to be rarely mentioned about Mandrake is what an excellent custom install it makes – you can have a nice 1.4 Gb stripped KDE install that’s fast, light and fairly comprehensive – only install what you need – strip KDE right down and get rid of those “K” apps that you never use.
Wait this is news?
It’s part of a series of articles the site is publishing. Every single other one in the series has been mentioned on OSNews, so I’m amazed you guys managed to miss that. It’s a series of articles in which normal users explain which OS they use and why they like it, it’s not a review and it’s not PR.
“It’s part of a series of articles the site is publishing. Every single other one in the series has been mentioned on OSNews, so I’m amazed you guys managed to miss that. It’s a series of articles in which normal users explain which OS they use and why they like it, it’s not a review and it’s not PR.”
Exactly. The other posters whining about it not being a review, but an advertisement for Mandrake are way off base. It is part of a series where someone says why they use such and such for their desktop OS. The series has included most Linux distros (and more to come), as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac, Windows, and FreeDOS.
It’s just a knee jerk reaction for some OSNews posters to complain about Mandrake or complain about anyone or any article saying anything positive about Mandrake.
As far as I’m aware, Mandrake is the only distro that does a PPPoE install without jumping through any hoops to get it working. Just supply the username and password and fire away.
If I recall correctly, this has been the case since their 8.0 release, almost 4 years ago.
Mandrake isn’t perfect and doesn’t hold the lead in any single category but out of the dozen or so distros I’ve tried over the years, it consistently strikes the best balance between performance, usability, flexibility and staying on the leading
edge ( or, at least, not too far behind the curve )
Avid user of Mandrake here and never saw it as workstation.Thought Mandrake was intentionally marketed as a multi-purpose desktop or light file server alternative.Isn’t it ?
Mandrakesoft are doing great job with Mandrakelinux. I use 10.2 cooker at home as my desktop OS. Current cooker snap is really stable and I have not faced any major mess. Their out of box support for multimedia is awesome. I have been submitting most of the assignments using OpenOffice. I am most impressed with URPMI. What a wonderful tool !!
Thanks Mandrake for such wonderful distro. Mandrakesoft can expect a new mandrakeclub member once I graduate and get a job 🙂
just make sure you don’t get the new kernel -2mdk, it’s horribly and totally broken. Stick to kernel-multimedia. Heh.
a+ – they’re using workstation in a slightly odd way here, to mean something like ‘desktop you do real work on’. That’s been the meaning of the phrase in every article in the series so far.
This is exactly the reason that I keep coming back to Mandrakelinux myself. It is the only distro I have tried that doesn’t make me jump through hoops to use my DSL modem. (and I like it.)
“a+ – they’re using workstation in a slightly odd way here, to mean something like ‘desktop you do real work on’. That’s been the meaning of the phrase in every article in the series so far”
Oh, because when I hear linux workstation I tend to think of gentoo, debian and slackware.
yea, you have to put down real work hours to get it working
thats sarcasm, just so everything is clear…
I always buy magazines with MandrakeLinux CDs or DVDs attached. IMO the easiest way to get MandrakeLinux. If you are lucky enough to live in a part of the world where they sell the Linux+ magazine, you even find additional PLF-packages on the DVD, required e.g. for watching CSS-cryted DVDs.
I use to be a big RedHat fan until they chose to go enterprise. I have tried Libranet, Gentoo, Fedora Core 3, Ubuntu and Solaris 10. All have their strong points, but I keep coming back to Mandrake. I presently run Mandrake 10.1 PowerPack. I have four PCs at home running Mandrake. Shared public and music drives and one machine is running Apache, MySQL. I have a local network machine running eGroupware so my wife, daughter and I can share contacts and calendar entries.
Mandrake utilities are easy to use and allow easy configuration. DrakConf is great. Solaris 10 only seemed to be able to use it’s utilites under CDE as root. JDE did not have any utilities and seemed only for users. Solaris 10 seemed to be designed for administrators with 10 years of experience with Solaris.
The key to a good distro is the community of users. Mandrake has an excellent community of users. That is why it is #1 on Distrowatch.com.
desktop: mandrake
server: slackware
When trying out differnet distributions for my new laptop, Mandrake Community 10.1 Community was the “commercial” one which made the best impression for me.
It looked very well thought out, and the things I needed worked. This was not at all so with Suse 9.1 – though my laptop is very much standard, and even certified to work with Suse!
Because I
a) have already some experience with Knoppix and Debian,
b) prefer free software and
c) am german-speaking
finally I settled for Knoppix 3.7 on HD, and am quite happy – but if ever the need for a commercial Linux version arises, first distribution I’ll be looking at will be Mandrake.