Sometimes I have this special feeling that some people don't use Mandriva because they feel ashamed of using it.

- Which distro are you using?
- Me? Debian of course. It is the only real thing. (You can replace Debian with Ubuntu, Slackware, Fedora,...) And you? What do you run on your system?
- Well,.... Mandriva
- Oh ....

*silence*

- Ever considered using a better distro?



Quite a few times I have seen/heard/read similar conversations. The result is almost always that many people that use Mandriva suffer from an instant inferiority complex (IMHO). They switch as fast as possible to another distro and claim afterwards that they
1. never used Mandriva because it sux and ain't free (three lies in one sentence. Cool, eh? )
2. used Mandriva once but it was "horrible, nothing worked" (although in reality almost everything worked well)
3. used Mandriva, but it was soon too noobish for them

Ouch. How can it be that people tend to bind their self-consciousness to a distro? How can it be that people feel ashamed of using a distro that definitely offers a good working environment?

First of all, I'd like to tell you (those that don't know me that long) that during the last six years, I have used all major and an uncounted number (50? 60?) of smaller distros. Although some distros (well,... some of their users) suffered from the same inferiority-complex as some Mandriva-folks, most people are proud of their distro, which is especially true of Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian and Slackware-users. People claim that their system is either easy to use, rock-stable, bug-free, only for real geeks, bleeding edge, offers a great look, customizable, lightning-fast and some more.

Let's take a look at what Mandriva offers:
- Since years, it is considered as one of the easiest to use and administrate distributions available. It has been acknowledged in several reviews and hundreds/thousands of users
- Mandriva has thus made it easy for many people to switch from Windows to Linux without frustrating them
- Mandriva offers a bleeding edge yet very stable operating system, just like Ubuntu, Debian Fedora, Suse, Gentoo and others
- Mandriva offers a flexible distribution. You can use it as a KDE or Gnome or Fluxbox or ... centric distro
- It allows to use graphical tools for administration and also allows you to configure everything through the cli (the latter one is apparently important for many geeks)
- Mandriva offers a good looking and fast distro.

All good things to have. And what does it lack?

- Upgrading from one release to another one is not 100% safe, but no distro available right can offer a completely safe procedure. Even rolling releases can break.
- Marketing. While other distros have learned that marketing is essential for success, Mandriva still lacks in that area (financial reasons?)
- For some time it lacked a vision. The company made some grave marketing-mistakes with the 12 months release schedule, as the"bleeding edge messiahs" don't like 12+ months release cycles (as you might remember: they left the ship in search for alternative distros that stick to a six months release cycle)

So, what does Mandriva offer? Taking all things into consideration, the distro is from a technical point of view a very solid product that works with most hardware you throw at it. Unpleasant things happen now and then, but the same applies for every other distro.

Now ask yourself, considering all this: does anyone have to feel ashamed of using Mandriva? I'd say no. But still more people flock to Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse. Is it all marketing? Maybe, maybe not, but I really wonder why so many people tend to ignore Mandriva, which offers a great product and why many people develop this inferiority complex.

I have given many distros a try. Most of them, including Mandriva, are really good. No need to feel ashamed.


Feel free to discuss it. Are/Were you ashamed of using Mandriva? Why might people feel so?

I certainly am not ashamed of using Mandriva! And I recommend it to anyone asking me what distribution they should use to enter the Linux world

Yves.

Ahhh, I must admit that I have, from time to time, discovered that I fall for the anything is better than Mandy syndrome. Then I go and try distro F or Distro P and perhaps, Distro K(u). But everytime I do, I only seem to keep them about a month, or less, before I go back to good ol' Mandrake (oops, sorry Mandriva).

As the Yin Yeti stated, I alwasy recomend Mandriva to my friends as the Linux distro to go with for the simple reason of: It is truly user friendly, especially for anyone's first look at Linux.



P.S.> don't tell anybody that I run Mandriva. I wouldn't want that to get out. ;}

i am currently struggling with mdv on my laptop. i am not ashamed to be a mandriva user but i am having second thoughts on the second release on a row. this might be my hardware causing the failure but ubuntu does not have the same problem.

ok so ubuntu freezes my laptop which is why i uninstalled it. but nevertheless, i had high hopes for the current release.

archlinux on my desktop, and if the third time is not a charm tomorrow, i am going to try the latest ubuntu on my lappy. :(

ciao!

Don't know where you've got that from, arctic, I've never heard of this phenomenon.

I've never heard of people switching out of embarrassment and those that do use it are more than happy to explain the advantages.

Distro elitism/snobbery call it what you will, has and will always exist. If A,B,C is ashamed to admit they use Mandriva that's their hang-up. They are the same ones who would be ashamed to admit they still use Winblows too!! Mandriva is a popular distro and has a huge following. I can't even count the amount of times I go into forums and as far I can see Fedora problems dominate the threads. Like you I too have tried countless distros, but only two have instantly made me feel welcome and comfortable using them Mandriva (Mandrake as it was back then) and PCLinuxOS (I know it's a fork of Mandriva). I know they have crappy customer care, even so they still have a great following. It's all a bit of a nonesense aurgument because underneath all the gloss they are all the same GNU/Linux.

In my opinion:
- Debian is a legend: THE free GNU/Linux for almost all Linux-supported platforms.
- Slackware is like the 100+-year-old elder in the neighboorhood: they knew how to do things, back in those days, and things weren't bloated like they are these days… (not my opinion, but that's the feeling I get from comments I've read about Slack)
- Fedora benefits from Redhat's excellent reputation, while still appearing new and dynamic to people, their fork from the "real" Redhat being quite recent.
- Ubuntu is shining new and richly supported by a very dynamic company. Besides, their "sudo"-centered administration (an idea I don't like) may certainly appeal to a lot of former windows users.

- And Mandriva… nothing.
It is old, but not that much.
It has no great past to build upon, because they suffered in the past from being described as a Redhat-based distribution, even though it quickly became more fud than truth.
The name, for people to remember? "Mandrake" souded like a joke (in France at least), and "Mandriva" is still too new to be widely recognized.

Still, from a pure technical point of view, Mandriva is my choice for reasonably modern hardware.

Yves.

Well I read about it on several webforums and newssites (OSNews e.g.) and some years ago at the university.

I agree with Arctic on this one. The phenomena still exists and you can see it being expressed on numerous websites that allow comments to linux related articles.

I think that the fact that Mandriva is based in France whereas RedHat, SUSE and so on are based in the US plus also the Majority of Linux news sites are in the US too is a big factor.

I suspect Mandriva is doing well in Europe where the Majority are non English speaking.

I have my rants about Mandriva from time to time but to me it still surpasses the other distros for my purposes.

I think the ones who are most embarrassed are those that say that they tried it years ago and had lots of difficultys using it so gave it away, especially when they are reminded that all the others were just as difficult if not more so at that time. And even more so when informed about it being described in many articles as about the easiest of all to install and use

I certainly do not feel embarrassed about being a Mandriva enthusiast.

Cheers. John.

I think it depends heavily on the nature of the population and location. I can tell you that in Israel, AFAIK, Mandriva doesn't have a better or worse name than any other distros(though sadly I must admit Linux in general is not very popular here). Personally I can tell you I was never ashamed in using Mandiva. Sure you can say I'm still a newbie that didn't have enough time to develop those negative feelings, but I don't see myself suffering from those inferiority fellings in the future either.

I must tell you that I told about Mandriva to two of my collegues at work, and after about a month of using Vi$ta they tried Mandriva's live CD, and from there continued to full installation (my modest contribution to our efforts to control the world ).

It's a good distro and I was never ashamed of using it, shame was never considered when I chose to dump it in favour of something else.



I'm not sure, in UK Ubuntu seems to be stealing the limelight, and that appears to be so across the continent (anyone from France, Gemany, etc care to chip in with their thoughts on this).

Mandriva is still one of my favorite distros. Yes it has some flaws but it also has many advantages. I always recommend it to new Linux users (along with PCLinuxOS).

One thing i'm particularly proud of: filed a bug few weeks ago (2-3, can't remember) and the guys from bugzilla (Adam Wilson) contacted me yesterday about some additional information about it. Never happened to me. Good job!

I wish they improved their pre-relies QA though.

I was never ashamed in using Mandiva, because my friends don't even know what Linux is, so I'm kind of a Linux freak

I installed Mandriva on my laptop when I first got it because I wanted something easy to install and use. But I have an unsupported wireless card and my connection in Mandriva was terrible. So someone with the same card recommended Debian and I haven't had any problems since I switched. I installed Mandriva on my daughter's new computer because it's easy to use. But I left it because I had no choice. I needed wireless.

I have experienced the MDV ambivalence, and some other distros might have one or the other area covered, but none has the best all 'round marks for

installer/partitioner
hdwr detection
package selection
urpmi package installer (repos could be a little more clear...... even with easyurpmi))
stability

and to me the two most important

The MCC
the user base

IMHO no other distro comes close to fulfilling all these to the extent that MDV does.


I have loaded MDV on over 40 random PCs over the past 24 months and MDV nails everyone of them including dual and triple boots and dual HDs. I have loaded all the other major distros (*buntu, FC, Slack, Mepis, CentOS, Xandros) and about 10-15 smaller ones (pup, DSL, SAM, Zen, Austrumi, Kanotix, Linuxmint, sidux, etc) on these same PCs with mixed luck. Sorry, but for all the hype I have had more installation problems with *buntu than any other distro. Mandriva will load onto almost anything including my roto-tiller.


My only requests would be:
a cleaner website (which I believe they're working on)
easier to understand repositories (some packages/descriptions are not where/what a newb might expect them according to the MCC).
a little more PR to help push MDV along

i was thinking about this thread this morning and i just figured out what i would be ashamed of if i was using it for my desktop: SCO Linux. i think if that was the case then i would be this guy ->

ciao!

I was a die hard Mandrake user until around 9.2? When Texstar stopped making 3rd party packages for Mandy. It just wasn't the same for me anymore.

I tried it again recently but went back to PClinuxOS.

I need to try it again soon within vmware, I downloaded Mandriva 2008.1 One but haven't done much with it yet. However, I liked the look of it.

I tend to get bored with a distro easily, and it doesn't matter which one it is. I am always changing distros every six months to something else to try it out. I've had Fedora, and it doesn't have some things I need - and I don't want to compile them to get it. I can find the packages in Ubuntu or Mandriva without any problems, so that is nice.

I was never ashamed of Mandriva, and I wouldn't say I changed distros because of that. I like to learn, which is why I'm always trying something new. Last time I used Mandriva constantly, was Mandriva 2007.0. I need more hardware to have all the distros I like

Ian is a normadic linux user

OT:
I think it's perhaps the ghost from the past that's somehow hunting Mandriva in the light that people don't know it's changed (a kinda FUD?). That could be boiled down to non-existing PR.
If I take a look at Ubuntuforums subforums which have places for other distros http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=147 (our gatway for people who want to try another distro(s)) the most hot distros are Arch and Debian (and other Debian based) Distros, where Mandriva there's only a few threads/posts about (kudos to Adam to take time helping out there), which lead to
1) People don't know about Mandriva/what it is
2) Bad reputation from the past.

I think the Mandriva users need to user some power on saying; "YO! This is the new shit!!!!"

i would think that mdv-specific forums like this and the official one have something to do with that.

ciao!

Just a FYI- I'm not ashamed I use it, but instead... I feel proud!

I guess that this is an important factor. But I don't think that it can be corrected easily. First of all, the Mandriva community is not as vocal as some other communities. Secondly, it is always a tough job to restore your reputation, once it has taken a hit. And sadly, I do not see enough PR-Campaigns from Mandriva in order to correct things, but then, Mandriva was never a distro that excelled in marketing and the PR-department. A lot of good things were done by adamw, but he is only ONE person.

I guess it would also be helpful if the whole Linux community would stop spreading this "kind of FUD". I mean... why appraise one distro and badmouth other distros at the same time? After all, they are all based on Linux. The better the reputation of every distro, the better the reputation of Linux as a whole.

Aye, too true. However, there does seem to be way to far many distros out there.

Consolidate and conquer

Used to be my regular distro from 2001 to 2004... then, I discovered Arch and never really cared for any other distro- although I have been testing many of them.
Actually 2008.1 is pretty good (although some things PulseAudio related are not working that great), and certainly enough superior to *buntu 8.04 - so far tried both the KDE3 and XFCE4 DE's, as KDE4 is not a good DE to make comparisons, and I don't really care about Gnome.
In short, I prefer a few other distros, but Mandy is still in rather good shape.

I don't use Mandriva out of personal preference, but I would never feel ashamed to use it - and I don't think I've met someone who is. I have a couple friends who have actually been praising it since the latest release, which is new. Before they just considered it "Ok", and one was a PCLinuxOS fan at the time. Although, I think he's using Sidux now. They aren't the Arch Linux types, though - they prefer tools to config files.

Shame about using Mandriva??

More like smug is what I am feeling.

I think of all those poor B's struggling away to get things to work in Ubuntu which in Mandriva just work anyway and I can't believe my luck at discovering this distro (actually it should be rediscovering because the very first Linux distro that I ever used was Mandrake about 8 years ago, although to my shame I deleted it and went back to Windows until about 3 years ago because I couldn't get Mandrake to work although that was mostly due to my complete inexperience with computers in general at that time rather than anything to do with Mandrake).

In the past 3 years I have tried just about everything you can think of but nothing matches the usability of Mandriva (at least not at the moment). That is not to say that it is perfect because it still can't shut my laptop down properly (never mind hibernate or standby) but then again it does so occasionally and no other distro does at all, so even at that it is superior.

If I have any problem with Mandriva it is simply that it never breaks (even in my heavy hands!) so I get bored with never having to troubleshoot problems . I have a strategy for that though, I get hold of a Suse disc (or Fedora) and install one of those for a while. Suse gives me enough problems to last a lifetime and Fedora won't even install in the first place so eventually I am quite relieved to go back to Mandriva (not that I ever stop using it you understand, Suse or Fedora go onto another partition).

So all in all shame is definitely not what I feel about using Mandriva.

I have never been ashamed of Mandriva either.

Others have said "it just works" and I tend to agree. It was the first distro that I ever tried so many years ago (10 by my counting, though it could be more).

I have watched it evolve as linux in general evolved. I will still never forget an exact quote from the 8.1 powerpack manual



I laughed out loud, right there next to my computer.

I got tired of things not being as cutting edge as I wanted, so I switched to cooker sometime between 8.1 and 8.2 and used cooker up until 10.2 I think, when Mandrake bought Connectiva.

Around that time, my install broke (cooker has a tendency to do that) and I really didn't know enough to fix it myself, so I thought that I would try something else that would force me into learning more about my OS of choice. Along came Gentoo.

Fast forward a couple of years, and a couple of distros, and here I am. I actually just yesterday reinstalled Mandriva for the first time in years, and after some initial tweaking and file copying from a backup (since it was too big to burn to dvd), I once again upgraded to cooker. When I left my house this morning, it was still installing things, but that's only due to the fact that I started it when I woke up. When I get home, I have some drivers to install and a few config files to tweak and then I'm back to using Mandriva, with enough space left over on my new HD to experiment with whatever other distros I want (Arch is high on the list, and I may even try LFS).

Mandriva has been good to me over the years, and I really do like it. Now that I have the experience from Gentoo under my belt, you can bet the next time things break to the point where I can't boot into a GUI, I will know how to fix them.

Hell, maybe I'll even get my wife to give it a try.

Well, I'd say people are being a bit too gloomy...

Someone mentions Ubuntuforums. Well, they didn't *have* a Mandriva forum until two weeks ago, so that's progress. It was added on request by the Ubuntuforums population, BTW, not me . The volume of Mandriva-related posts there has increased appreciably over the last year or so, and the tone of those posts has got a lot more favourable towards MDV.

The same pattern is visible everywhere. I probably track this closer than anyone else, as it's my job. If you look at the general 'tone' of the Mandriva-related comments you get on, say, OS News, Slashdot, Digg, Distrowatch - general places like that - they've been getting constantly more positive for a couple of years now. In 2006, you could expect a lot of people saying Mandriva wasn't free because of the Club, a lot of people who had genuine problems with MDV, a lot of heat about Gael, pokes at the artwork and Frenglish, and so on.

These days, I haven't seen a post about MDV not being free for months. Even people who don't *use* MDV tend to be generally positive about it - they say they tried it out and it wasn't any better for them than what they were using but they think it looked like a fine distro, for instance. There's a lot more positive posts from MDV users. Look at posts about the latest releases - a lot of praise to MDV for going with KDE 3 and Firefox 2, people talk about things like /backports , the phone sync stuff, and so on. There's a lot more positive vibe about MDV than negative, which is great.

I've noticed a lot more traffic in the official forums lately (it's taking me hours a day to get through the darn things, which is why I don't post here so much). Our Distrowatch HPD numbers, if you set any stock by those, have been rising constantly for the last year and a half, from a low of 600-700 up to the current status of 930. We came second in the distro popularity section in the latest Linux Journal 2008 Readers' Choice survey, somewhat to the surprise of many - http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10065 . Even the MDV financials are improving lately. I'd say things are actually improving appreciably and consistently at the moment, which is a nice position to be in.

A lot of the issues raised in this thread are valid and important ones, but I'd say they're actually ones that are getting addressed, rather than the opposite.

- 7 year ago, I ask my office mate to download for me a redhat distro. He then told me that I should use Mandrake instead. But I insisted on RH, so that became my first distro. Then year 2004, I was able to download mandrake, then joined MUB, and since then, I always used Mandriva on my PC, at work and at home DESKTOP. I have used opensuse once, due to certain software that works on my setup is to SUse only, and Im not able to install it with mandriva, but now Im now back to Mandriva... at HOME and at WORK.

2008.1 at HOME
2007 at WORK..

yeah, am proud of it.

I don't usually chime in on this type of thread, but it made me think. I've used Mandrake from 9.0. My main system is 2008.1, and I still have a 9.2 system in use, on my old machine in the basement. That is the only release I ever got my HP 3200C scanner to work on.

Have I tried other distors? You bet, why not, its free... I have had Kubuntu and Xubuntu installed for about 4 years on an old laptop. I tried Red Hat ( before Fedora ) and I could never get all my hardware working. Mandrake worked out of the box, still does, and that is why I continue to use it on my main machine. It is stable, lots of stuff to try on URPMI repos.

Am I ashamed? I think that would be a little harsh, however I think there is some truth in the idea. If I recommend Mandriva, it is usually not this first one I mention. Ease of installation, there is nothing any better, but there are some that come close.

I think it was the bad rap Mandriva got, and it a few years ago that still hangs on. If you want to get up and running, Mandriva is as good as it gets.

Linux knowledge takes time to build. I tried Slackware first. I got it working, after a fight with X, audio, mounting disks etc. Sure I fixed it all, but why fight if you don't have to? There is a lot to be learned after a successful install. This is where I think a nob should start, not fighting with X or some driver install.

Mandy may have some drawbacks, but I'm hard pressed to think of one. I guess getting bored with nothing to fix is one...

I'm going to install Slack 12.1 on a P4 machine I have XP on. I want to learn to compile a kernel. I don't want to screw up my main system, I need it for daily things. The reason is simple, distos kernels today support a lot of stuff I don't have installed. I want to see what type of performance increase I can have by creating a stripped down kernel. So there you have my wooden nickels worth.

I am not ashamed to use MDV but many times you mention it you get a lot of negative reactions to it and feel the need to get defensive. luckily at that time adam useally popups up (he must watch a lot of blogs and forum for mandriva to be mentioned)

The performance gain here is about 15%.

BTW: I'm definitely NOT ashamed using Mandriva. It was recommended to me by a much more experienced user many years ago (already knew some Unixes), and I've never regretted it. Compared to SuSE i.e. it's a much better choice, and a very good distro to learn linux, too.

ffi: mostly I follow OSNews, Linux Today, fsdaily.org, Slashdot, The Register and tuxmachines.org to find news. I also follow the distrowatch review list in the sidebar. Periodically I just search news.google.com for Mandriva and see what comes up.

It's perfectly safe to build kernels on Mandriva, so long as you copy the source into your home directory and do it there. You can't damage anything else in the building process, and kernels are designed to be installed alongside each other - so you stick your new kernel and initrd in /boot , add it to grub or lilo, and try booting it. If it doesn't work, so what? All your other kernels are still right there on the boot menu.

You might be disappointed at the performance, though. Remember that these days the vast majority of drivers in the kernel are built as modules, which means unless the hardware they support is actually present on your system, they'll never be loaded and will never have the slightest impact on performance. Building your own kernel was a more useful idea back in the days - five, six years ago now - when distros provided kernels with lots of the drivers built in statically, so they were loaded all the time and wasted memory even if the hardware they supported wasn't in your machine.

When I came to Linux about a year ago. I was tired of XP, and wanted something I could work with and in time learn more about. I'm still an 'average' user. Meaning I don't do video editing, major graphics projects or anything else with my computers. SO naturally I want something that is polished and easy to work with. I can't be a hopper like some people. I want something that works and I want something I can keep using.

When I first started. Tried SuSE. I liked their lang support and working in China I wanted that. Then they did the deal and I chose not to bother with them. Then a friend told me about Mandy. Long story short, I was impressed then. Any troubles we had, were due to inexperience or in this case learning steps. We burned to fast. Media in China sucks!!! I now burn to DVD's cause the CD quality is just horrible and you never know which ones are good. (Some DVDs aren't good either)

I have two distros I use. Mandriva and 'sidux'. Now the reason is simple. Mandy is easy to use and works. 'sidux' works and the manual was so good that I began to learn things so it's good for learning. At my stage now. I just want to 'use' my computer. Not baby sit it.

sidux works and Mandy works. (I never tried Buntu, once Mint and what it was was slow. Buntu coding. Real Debian is cleaner and faster) Between Mandy and Debian, binary, I can find most of what I need. (I need e17!!!!!) E17 is also another reason I actually ended up with Debian, somehow that project seems mixed with Debian a lot.

Later, one of these days, I'll try Arch. (I think Gentoo is too hard for me but like having knowledge.) For this user, 3-4 distros is enough and Mandy will be one of my primaries.

I also play with Sabayon, cause I definately feel Gentoo is beyound me to set up on my own. Mostly I don't 'need' bleedng edge though and the other bonus for me of Debian is a stable that can sit there for a while before it needs upgrading...

I like Mandriva and give it to every windowsfile here in China who is complaining about their viruses and how to do things in windows cause in short they know nothing about computers. U know what, they always find Mandy is easier. (Now with Vbox, they can run those pesky little programs they 'must' have from windows)

Mandy with attention to detail, is much more polished and better than Ubuntu. I think Mandy needs to get some company that makes PC's to put Mandy on it.

Here's my idea. Hint, if someone from Mandriva company reads this. Talk to VIA!! Their mininote idea was taken ahead by Asus, but with the new chip coming out and their chip development house invested in Linux, it can be a nice marriage. VIA is a Taiwanese company. Most of Asia is looking at Linux now especially gov to get out from under Big Brothers eyes and windows back doors to their gov secrets...

Happy to use Mandy. Next to sidux, it's the only other good supporter of my HP tx1000. Which is a bit of a troublesome computer I read from many other forums for many other distros.
It gets better and better. With this release, one problem was solved that worried me when giving it to new users. Configuring sources and when I used it and got that automatic Urpmi add sources. I was first a bit put out, I liked the old way cut and paste CLi, but then I was like "WOW", this is great! Now I can really give it to anyone!!

Keep up the good work and sometimes my only little niggle, is don't make a change for the sake of change. If it's good, like this new automated thing, and hope there'll be something to help automate upgrades, then it's worth the hassle cause such big changes may mean an upgrade for those of us starting earlier may be a hassle, but it's good in the long run for usability and the new comers. Yet just polish what is there. It's so much already...

Keep listening to the users about what is easier. I think it's paying off.

They had a few deals like this. Not sure what the current status of them is, though. adamw might know?

Well, seems I'm allowed to talk about this now...

http://www.gdium.com

is our current project. It's a netbook (or whatever you want to call it) which runs a customized Mandriva Flash. Interesting technical note is that it uses the Loongson CPU, which is not x86-compatible, so we ported Mandriva entirely to a new architecture for this project. It's a pretty normal netbook in most ways, but it has no internal storage: everything's on the 'G-Key', which is basically a Flash. Some people see this as a drawback but I think it's neat - it's great for security (just keep the key with you and only plug it in when you use the machine; even if someone steals the machine, or you lose it, there's absolutely nothing on it without the key), and flexible in situations where you would want a pool of machines (family or office, maybe). You just plug the key into any Gdium and go ahead and use it.

(It just occurred to me it'd be awesome if we could get big enough keys to be dual - plug it in a Gdium and it boots the Gdium-tailored edition, plug it in a regular PC and it boots normal MDV Flash, and the two share data - but I don't think that'll be possible for a few years. I should suggest it though!)

It's coming out in at least Australia later this year. I think it'll also be released in Europe, or at least France. Not sure about elsewhere in the world.

Sounds pretty cool.

Ashamed of Mandrake?
Ehh, I mean, Mandriva?

Heck no, why would I have named my website after it?

Why would anyone be ashamed of what OS they use, if it's something they chose on purpose?
Now, if you're ashamed of your past behaviour / choices or position, that I can imagine.

But I don't even think most MSWin users who 'know better' are ashamed...

Things that Mandriva (Mandrake) has in its favour (most already mentioned, but anyway) :
- one of the first if not _the_ first distribution to aim for the desktop, instead of corporate servers
- and make that work pretty well even back in the late nineties
- first gratis available distribution to offer NTFS partition resizing - back in the day when XP started becoming popular and more and more machines were sold with NTFS, this was really important
- committed to Free Software
- still one of the easiest to use distributions, solid hardware detection and support - yes people claim it was flakey in the past, no I'm not one of those, I've always had good to very good experience with Mandrake/iva also on hardware that was 'too hard' for SuSE, Ubuntu and whatnot
- DE/WM agnostic - though many keep FUDding that it's KDE centered
- fact that one can mix and match in the use of the drakwizards and config file editing.
- urpmi and the new automagical repo setup
- first 'mostly open' distribution to offer fully legal DVD playback (I know, I know, Lindows had that too at some point)
- community around Mandriva, though it's hardly as necessary (to me since I know how to use Linux / Mandriva, and to the users in general since Linux / Mandriva has become very very easy to use)


Things that Mandriva has against it:
- Ubuntu's astroturfing (see my Ubuntu review - I still rate it below Mandriva - didn't install latest yet I must admit - though it's catching up)
- people comparing Mandriva of x months ago to complete fresh distro y - on very new hardware, where distro y has a newer kernel which just happens to support said newer hardware better
- people thinking back at old and very old negative experiences with Mandriva/Mandrake

I'm sure in the above lists I'm forgetting some points, but these are the main ones to come to my mind at this hour of the night....

Am I proud to be a Mandriva user?
I don't know, don't think so. I'm proud to be in control of my systems, but I could do that with most other Linuxes as well, I'm sure.


On the gdium: I saw it mentioned somewhere before, and realised one thing: if this thing becomes popular, that'd be a sure sign of the end of Microsoft as we know it.

And another thing that I realised a long long time ago: the moment a fully Free Software system gets mainstream popularity (as in: over 15 - 25% marketshare) is the moment the hardware manufacturers can drop x86. As someone in the hardware / chip industry, I would really dig it if someone would just come up with a new CPU/dsp architecture and tilt Intel upside down...

Interesting, what cpu architecture, and what price (AUD)?

Ashamed of Mandrake? No, just moved on to other things. I don't really have any time for other distros nowadays unfortunately.

The data sheet seems to say it's a MIPS architecture.

Yep - it's based on the Chinese Loongson CPU, which is based on MIPS. Info from the manufacturer here: http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/bd/13577.htm

This site: http://www.emtec-australia.com.au/products...m_empc_89/123/1

lists it at AU$580, which compares quite well to the Aspire One and Eee.