Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

Posted Jan 7, 2005 7:24 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792)
Parent article: Mandrakelinux 10.1 on AMD64

"Of course, there is always a possibility that these were just bugs."

As a long time Mandrake user, I can confirm that this is indeed the case and it has been like this since about 2000. There is a clear pattern to the bugs as well: they usually have to do with a GUI application, more recently it seems that the persons responsible for the mirrors want to have their share of brown-paper-bag cockups as well.

The irony is, for a home user like me, Mandrake provides the best selection of packages (Red Hat is not good for a KDE user, SuSE has no PLF equivalent) with an easy installation. Their own software however, has always been buggy and what worries me is that recently this has spread to the release process as well. There are some engineers that know what they are doing, the kernel people and the people handling security updates get it right most of the time and the guys who wrote urpmi certainly knew what they were doing. But the majority of the people who produced the Mandrake Control Center and now later some of their other apps, should simply never be allowed to code again.

The cockup that happened last Easter when all mirrors (including security updates) were unavailable for more than a week and even longer for older releases, indicates that Mandrake lacks any kind of formal process to do things. The constant re-designs of the Control Center tells the same, somebody is doing them just because he likes to do ui design and he has no boss to tell him that it already looked great in the previous release and he should now concentrate on fixing bugs.

My all-time favorite Mandrake bug, which shows clearly what we are dealing with, was in the Internet Connection Wizard, which had a button with a text: "Press here to run the wizard ->" (don't remember the exact text), but at the end of the arrow there was no button, it had been moved to the left side of the app :-)

All in all, Mandrake is a great distro, with a history of being truly free (not like Lindows) and if you find a Control Center app that doesn't work, don't use it, there is always a standard Linux way to configure things (command-line, text files... ).