Hi, thanks for reading, and almost a good point

Hi, thanks for reading, and almost a good point

The quality of the official versions is higher, and full support was always included with the purchase. User support for the Community releases was in principle limited to whatever Google could find for you (IOW, about the same value as the support MS ships with, say, XP :-). In practice, the Cooker list in particular is very helpful, since problems reported there are likely to result in fixes to the Official version, and general awareness of Mandrake and Mandrake issues has always been reasonably high.

For example, I was delighted when the obscure WinBond memory-stick reader (and other random things) chip in my laptop suddenly started working under the Mandrake kernel provided in the 10.2/2005LE download version specifically because of non-mainstream patches that Mandrake shipped with their kernel, and only thought to try it again with 10.2/2005LE because of a post referencing both Mandrake and the device.

Fedora and Community are not exact parallels, but I assert that Mandrake pioneered the general concept amongst Linux distros. I prefer Mandrake's (now Mandriva's) approach, but that may just be me. It'll be interesting to see what influence Conectiva has on the partnership.

A couple of requests, since you're reading anyway: can you clone Warly? We need at least three of him. (-:

Oh, and can we pretty please get rid of the "stoned penguin" theme completely for the 2006 release? It terrifies people. On the gripping hand, it did lead me to finally put together my own theme set to integrate into my own version of the release.