Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux [LWN.net]

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 9:10 UTC (Sat) by Albert88 (guest, #42892)
In reply to: Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux by moxfyre
Parent article: Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Many people use Mandriva, since they have a huge download rate, 10K per
day and more than 5 million users. Probably they do less buzz than the
Ubuntu people.
Actually, I'm using Kubuntu on my laptop to **try** to understand why
Ubuntu is so popular, and I have not found why, honestly. The reason does
not come from the product itself, which is poor. I'm really surprised by
the basic errors that I found on Kubuntu after only a few weeks of usage.
For example, the installer freezes sometimes and I have to remove a .lock
file by hand. I've never been able to install my HP network printer on
Ubuntu. The driver seems wrong and I'm too lazy to try with another ppd
file. Why should I ? With Mandriva it worked a charm.
Mandriva is much better, with the 3D office available and the very good
Mandriva control center. Ubuntu does not even have a control center ...
I wonder where Shuttleworth put his dollars. Probably in marketing buzz,
certainly not in the product.

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Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 14:13 UTC (Sat) by larryn (guest, #3457) [Link]

Ditto, Albert! As far as user-friendliness, Ubuntu still months away to catch up with Mandriva. I guess when you're millionaire, it's not too hard to create hype :)

I'm very happy with latest Mandriva. I have it running MythTV backend and frontend on workstation and laptop with TV out. Ubuntu's mythtv constanly crahshes on my laptop.

We also successfully rolled out a student lab using our customized distro based on Mandriva and LiveCD project. The server uses Mandriva's terminal-server package (not LTSP) providing connectivity for 5 DevonIT thin-clients and 5 donated monitors. Project cost: $850 :)

urpmi is all I need thanks to plf, main and contrib repos :)

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 20, 2007 14:48 UTC (Sat) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

I actually changed from mandriva, partly because of the control center..

So much wasted energy going into weird applications. That energy should be spent on making hardware work _without_ some weird control center.

I'm not using fedora, but the projects redhat employees start, actually solves problems at the core, instead of painting them over. Subjective opinion... and ofcourse other distros also create good new stuff. But especially mandriva seem to spend their energy/time/money in wrong places.

Maybe redhat employees/procects are just better at getting traction from other developers.

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 21, 2007 17:08 UTC (Sun) by NedLudd (guest, #37615) [Link]

I tried Ubuntu for about five months or so before ditching it for PCLinuxOS...my main gripe with Ubuntu was I had to spend a couple of hours to get my soundcard to work by turning on oss emulation and all that jazz...now I know what to do but initially it took a little while :-) ....no framebuffer console out of the box nor gcc out of the box....

With pcLinuxOS everything just worked....there was sound coming from my old sound card...gcc was there without me having to install it....and a nice framebuffer waiting for me on ctrl-alt-f*...

Here comes the Spring: a new life cycle for Mandriva Linux

Posted Jan 23, 2007 8:41 UTC (Tue) by Albert88 (guest, #42892) [Link]

I'm sure you are aware that PCLinuxOS is based on Mandriva ? They even
didn't bother changing the name in some places. So why not using the real
one ?