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My Mandriva 2006 Review (or Rant) :)


iphitus
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Mandriva have no direction.

 

I hadnt used Mandriva over a year, until last week. In a fit of boredom, I very grabbed the latest release and installed to my spare partition, in hope that there would be something new, something interesting. Maybe something to spark me to use it for a week like ubuntu did. I found myself wanting to reboot to Arch as soon as I could.

 

It was the same as it was last time I used it. That is the problem here, it was exactly the same! Nothing changed! Nothing new, nothing fancy, nothing different.

 

The new features I found: Improved wireless, new wallpaper, completely unusable Single CD installation.

 

Mandrake need to change and evolve with other distros. Everything I see in Mandrake is very very dated. Bootsplash, now deprecated by fbsplash, or ubuntu's usplash. initrd has been replaced by initramfs, supermount has been replaced by countless userspace tools. Supermount especially, really really makes me cringe. It looks old. It uses an old kernel. It uses OpenOffice 1.x. It's menus are still a mystery to a new user. When I first used Mandrake, back at 8.2, I tried every app in the menu to find out what they were, because the names were so indecipherable. One of the nice things about ubuntu and other distros now, is that they name the programs reasonably. The GIMP becomes Image Editor (GIMP) or something along those lines.

 

Down the bottom right, there is a ? icon in the system tray. I click this, in vain, hoping for help, maybe a link to the repositories and how to install more things. Or a link to a useful help site like MandrakeUsers.org which they have still failed to acknowledge, despite it being such an awesome representative of the community, repository of information, and great assistance.

 

"Mandrake Online"

"This assistant will help you upload your configuration (...) to a centralised database in order to keep you informed about security updates and useful upgrades"

 

No useful help there, not sure why it has a '?' for an icon.

 

Mandrake has pretty good repositories, I loved that when I used to use it as my primary distro - now three years ago. I cannot fathom, why they have yet to add an easy to use tool to AT LEAST add the basic repositories, updates, contrib and main to urpmi. I understand they cannot add plf and others, I have no problem with that. But it is absolutely *criminal* that a user must be told by a member of the community about easyurpmi.

 

Mandrake don't even recognise their own repositories existence. Nor do they show any obvious pointers to rpmdrake and other installation tools. These things should be presented to a user on boot, not things about mandrakeonline, a survey, and mandrakeclub.

 

Heck, I thought the merger with Connectiva might have added something new or interestin. It certainly didn't. I see no influence from it at all

 

Some might say Mandriva too busy to worry about creating commonsense tools and worrying about nitpicky things like this. What have they been doing then? Saving themselves from bankruptcy right? Getting the business working again? To do that successfully, they must offer some love to their most used product. Their free releases.

 

A few of you might be thinking, I know nothing of what I speak of and that Mandrake have to go to all this trouble updating KDE and Firefox and all of their software for each release. If they cannot do that and improve at the same time, they have issues.

 

I'm a developer on the another distribution. We manage to keep our distribution more up to date than almost any other -- we update our software with almost every single release of that application. We update and change things! We improve the distro! And we're volunteers who receive *no* payment.

 

Honestly, if we can improve our distro, Arch Linux, and update it, and we're volunteers who do it in our spare time, I don't understand why Mandriva fail to do the same for their floundering distro - and they get paid to do it for a full time job.

 

They need more than 'Marketing' they need an entire change of direction.

 

James

 

edit: typos :)

Edited by iphitus
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Not having a pop, so please don't take the wrong way :P , just an explanation maybe on why.....

 

Have you looked at Red Hat recently? This is the same, only a lot more behind the times. Kernel 2.6.9.34 current version on my RHEL4 AS system. Other packages also out-of-date, requiring that when I build a system for a specific reason, sometimes I have to use dag's repository to download rpms I need (I don't like to compile unless I really have to).

 

The reason, stability over bleeding edge up-to-dateness (is there such a word?!? :P )

 

Not that I'm saying bleeding edge isn't stable, but when you're dealing with corporate customers, they need stability over bleeding edge. They are aiming at the more corporate market, but hitting a bit of middle ground of some later versions, and some not so late (KDE 3.5 is one).

 

I use Gentoo as you can see from my signature, and have recently installed arch into vmware to see what it's like. I like to experiment with other distros, compare what they have got, their pros/cons against my normal usage of Mandrake/Mandriva.

 

Each distro will have a direction, and whilst some people want bleeding edge, they will choose the distro that suits their requirement. Others for stability, will choose the version that suits theirs. Whilst cooker is bleeding edge, it's not necessarily stable. There doesn't seem to be an in-between, and of course this would mean making two distros to cover the people who want stability versus the ones that want bleeding edge. You have to choose one or the other. They chose stability. And us as users have the choice of stability versus bleeding edge.

 

For me, that's what makes using Linux an inspiration. Choice, rather than being forced to use what we're told to.

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Have you looked at Red Hat recently? This is the same, only a lot more behind the times. Kernel 2.6.9.34 current version on my RHEL4 AS system. Other packages also out-of-date, requiring that when I build a system for a specific reason, sometimes I have to use dag's repository to download rpms I need (I don't like to compile unless I really have to).

RHEL is a very very different situation. Aimed at an entirely different audience. I'm talking the home desktop.

The reason, stability over bleeding edge up-to-dateness (is there such a word?!? :P )

Arch is reasonably stable despite it's bleeding edge'ness.

 

Not that I'm saying bleeding edge isn't stable, but when you're dealing with corporate customers, they need stability over bleeding edge. They are aiming at the more corporate market, but hitting a bit of middle ground of some later versions, and some not so late (KDE 3.5 is one).

Mandriva Free != Corporate. It's the users. And I pointed out a lot of usability flaws, many of which have existed for eons. If Mandriva are dropping their Free releases in favour of their corporate work, then it might be better to drop it entirely, because its stagnating.

 

I use Gentoo as you can see from my signature, and have recently installed arch into vmware to see what it's like. I like to experiment with other distros, compare what they have got, their pros/cons against my normal usage of Mandrake/Mandriva.

Good on ya.

 

Each distro will have a direction, and whilst some people want bleeding edge, they will choose the distro that suits their requirement. Others for stability, will choose the version that suits theirs. Whilst cooker is bleeding edge, it's not necessarily stable. There doesn't seem to be an in-between, and of course this would mean making two distros to cover the people who want stability versus the ones that want bleeding edge. You have to choose one or the other. They chose stability. And us as users have the choice of stability versus bleeding edge.

 

For me, that's what makes using Linux an inspiration. Choice, rather than being forced to use what we're told to.

Unfortunately theres a line between stable and old. It's different for commercial purposes, so dont bring that into this.

 

Ubuntu is reasonably stable. Arch is reasonably stable. Arch is a different type of distro, so I'm leaving it outta here from now on.

 

Ubuntu still isnt bleeding edge though, it uses an older kernel too, it does however use initramfs for example, which has existed since through 2.5 and the start of the 2.6 series.... years ago. It uses its own splash technology, rather than bootsplash, which has been orphaned by it's developers... well over a year ago. Ubuntu has none/few of the aforementioned usability issues in my last post. Ubuntu manages to still have more up to date software too. Ubuntu is an example of what Mandriva could at least attempt to do, it's not without it's flaws -- and there are some situations where mandrake may well have better solutions, but at least ubuntu makes an effort to change, develop and add things. Mandriva have changed practically nothing.

 

James

Edited by iphitus
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OK, I'll forget the Corporate bit :P

 

I think what I was trying to say is, that while you have Mandriva Free, Powerpack, etc, etc, they're all based on the same setup. They most likely all default to 2.6.12.12mdk kernel from install. They most likely all have the same versions of software. As opposed to let's say, Free and Powerpack being more up-to-date than compared to their Corporate offerings. To me it seems they chose this to save themselves time in preparing different offerings with different versions of software.

 

This could be why they still stick to bootsplash and supermount, because it's easy than to try and change it and incorporate what I had to do recently when I manually compiled my kernel for Mandriva 2006 to run 2.6.15.6. Whilst I've gotten around these issues (applying bootsplash patch, using autofs instead of trying to find a supermount patch), I'm pretty sure my system is OK now, since I've not noticed any other issues. Although some others on my kernel posts are having a few other minor problems, but this may or may not be a cause of the kernel upgrade.

 

That's my thoughts on what I think they've done. Whether or not this is the right thing to do, I don't know.

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Iphitus most of what you wrote is true. I'm just making some clarifications.

AFAIK supermount is only there to mount floppies any other mounting is handled by gnome-volume-manager even under KDE.

It is possible to add repos through the software sources manager (or how that thing is called in English).

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Iphitus most of what you wrote is true. I'm just making some clarifications.

AFAIK supermount is only there to mount floppies any other mounting is handled by gnome-volume-manager even under KDE.

It is possible to add repos through the software sources manager (or how that thing is called in English).

 

I knew about the sources manager.... but when I last used it, it didnt have lists of repositories that you could *check to enable, or mirrors to choose from for all the major mirrors mentioned earlier.

 

ianw1974: My point about supermount and bootsplash, are just examples of mandrake's averseness to update and change.

 

It's not like the alternatives have appeared in the last month. Bootsplash hasnt been actively developed nor improved for well over a year, dare I say two years. Third parties have been updating the patches, but it is no longer being developed. Ubuntu had the initiative of developing their own alternative, usplash, as with spock of the gentoo community. fbsplash developed by spock is about a year and a half old. Seen anything like that from Mandrake in the last year?

 

Like I said, theres a difference between stable... and old.

 

Supermount, good to see it has been relegated to floppies only. It's own developer has disowned it, and no longer supports, develops or even discusses it.

 

iphitus

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As I found out, supermount also affected CD-ROM's, which is why I had to use autofs to get them to automount. So not just there for floppies, it's just /etc/fstab shows supermount against the floppy option, it doesn't against cdrom, but it is still used for CDROM.

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As I found out, supermount also affected CD-ROM's, which is why I had to use autofs to get them to automount. So not just there for floppies, it's just /etc/fstab shows supermount against the floppy option, it doesn't against cdrom, but it is still used for CDROM.

Oh, in that case, ick :P

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Mandriva have no direction.

 

I hadnt used Mandriva over a year, until last week. In a fit of boredom, I very grabbed the latest release and installed to my spare partition, in hope that there would be something new, something interesting. Maybe something to spark me to use it for a week like ubuntu did. I found myself wanting to reboot to Arch as soon as I could.

 

It was the same as it was last time I used it. That is the problem here, it was exactly the same! Nothing changed! Nothing new, nothing fancy, nothing different.

This was my experience in 9.x and it hasn't changed ...

The new features I found: Improved wireless, new wallpaper, completely unusable Single CD installation.

 

Mandrake need to change and evolve with other distros. Everything I see in Mandrake is very very dated. Bootsplash, now deprecated by fbsplash, or ubuntu's usplash. initrd has been replaced by initramfs, supermount has been replaced by countless userspace tools. Supermount especially, really really makes me cringe. It looks old. It uses an old kernel. It uses OpenOffice 1.x. It's menus are still a mystery to a new user. When I first used Mandrake, back at 8.2, I tried every app in the menu to find out what they were, because the names were so indecipherable. One of the nice things about ubuntu and other distros now, is that they name the programs reasonably. The GIMP becomes Image Editor (GIMP) or something along those lines.

Again still what I found in 9.x ... However things like the menu's, personally I prefer the reverse Gimp and then image editor... its sometimes frustrating to have 10 items called CD player or image editor or package manager... so it would be better IMHO to reverse the thing so the name comes first .. its especially frustrating on my old laptop when I realise I just opened the wrong image editor with my crappy touchpad !

 

 

Mandrake has pretty good repositories, I loved that when I used to use it as my primary distro - now three years ago. I cannot fathom, why they have yet to add an easy to use tool to AT LEAST add the basic repositories, updates, contrib and main to urpmi. I understand they cannot add plf and others, I have no problem with that. But it is absolutely *criminal* that a user must be told by a member of the community about easyurpmi.
Yep its up there with their 10 best hidden features you need some sort of secret society knowledge to gain access to.
Mandrake don't even recognise their own repositories existence. Nor do they show any obvious pointers to rpmdrake and other installation tools. These things should be presented to a user on boot, not things about mandrakeonline, a survey, and mandrakeclub.

Yeah I love the surrvey idea... before you have any chance to even work out if stuff actually works.

Heck, I thought the merger with Connectiva might have added something new or interestin. It certainly didn't. I see no influence from it at all

Merger ... seemed more like a takeover to me.

But seriously the easy way to merge the distro's was only keep what's common and .. what was common was the most basic stuff. Basically all the good bits of connectiva seem to have been put aside ... like with the lycoris tablet PC distro.. its now frozen. I asked about it at the Linux Expo in Paris a month ago and the marketing guy hadn't even heard of it. The code which was opensource is now opensource, locked in a cupbaord with a sign on saying "radiation risk do not open" .. (I guess)

 

Some might say Mandriva too busy to worry about creating commonsense tools and worrying about nitpicky things like this. What have they been doing then? Saving themselves from bankruptcy right? Getting the business working again? To do that successfully, they must offer some love to their most used product. Their free releases.
You are preaching to the converted here. Their idea of common sense tools is limit the user to what you think they might want to do. The problem is as soon as you step outside the tiny box they have made the tools not only don't have any options but have laready implemented some goofy way of doing Internet connection sharing or something which messes up something else.

Easy Samba config? well so long as you don't want to use it in a different way... but the problem then is that SWAT or webmin cannot edit the config files because they have been edited by mandr__ specific tools in a weird way. They just create themselves a circular mess. Obviously CIFS keeps changing and they have provided a default tool that most noobies will have used .. so each time something outsiode their control changes (like CIFS) they have to update the tool which is duplicating the work of SWAT.... mutliply this by every tool they have implemented and they have created a development nightmare where the developers spend their whole time trying to keep up with things outside their control.

 

A few of you might be thinking, I know nothing of what I speak of and that Mandrake have to go to all this trouble updating KDE and Firefox and all of their software for each release. If they cannot do that and improve at the same time, they have issues.
Exactly why I binned my last install. Its even worse of you need to change a kernel because you end up with a task list of stuff to do from a clean install just to get back (hopefully) to where you were before the install .. and the sum of the reinstall as you rightly say is not much new.

 

I'm a developer on the another distribution. We manage to keep our distribution more up to date than almost any other -- we update our software with almost every single release of that application. We update and change things! We improve the distro! And we're volunteers who receive *no* payment.
Yep like you IMHO pinpointed above... they are spending all their time on cute tools.
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Yes, Mandriva has a problem, no doubt there. The look and feel of the desktop has not changed recently. That is not all that bad. But what I think is bad is that they still stick to the old "rotten" Galaxy theme. Yes, hell, it is dated! It might have been flashy once, but now, it looks like grandma's old trousers, imho. Simply worn out. (Sorry, grandma...)

 

What is good about Mandriva is that they finally improved the system speed. The booting became faster, the installation became faster ... but easyurpmi ain't there. I cannot understand that. My beloved Fedora comes with all important and legal repos set up by default. And I constantly get updated kernels (Currently running on 2.6.15). Mandriva hides the updates pretty well from users. Not a good idea, imho.

 

Mandriva wants to offer pretty stable stuff. But honestly: if they want to provide a stable desktop, then Firefox should not be crashing every ten times I open it, OpenOffice2 should not crash constantly only because I am downloading new dictionaries because the ones on Mandrivas mirrors are messed up somehow. (Don't know what they did, but it never crashed on my other distros). They should make sure that their system is pretty stable, before adding e.g. KAT which is buggy, or some borked up Beagle, that fails to index anything and furthermore erases data. And why don't my latop-keyboards work in Mandriva but e.g. in Ubuntu and other distros? There are many things to wonder about Mandriva.

 

But despite all these problems, I have to praise Mandriva for the MCC which is a great tool for newcomers to Linux. Sure, I don't need it (Slackware and the Yoper-development made me forget about it). but for someone who never administrated anything, it is a good start. But then, there is again a problem: How shall you learn about the ins and outs of the MCC, if Mandriva keeps the documentation pretty locked? Online, you only have access to the 10.1 release or older manuals, unless you are a club-member. And even then, the translation is incomplete in many areas afaik. They need to change a lot. Start with the management. They made some pretty bad decisions lately, imho.

 

Like Iphitus, I am developing a Linux distro together with others. Mine is Yoper. We are a small crew, but our apps did not crash that much and our distro is way faster, although we don't get paid. If people complain, we take their complaints serious. But Mandriva? I hope that Mandriva will finally start to take reviews and user-complaints serious, otherwise, they will be in trouble again in the near future.

 

Oh boy, I sound pessimistic. :)

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Actually, ever since they begged for money, Mandrake/Mandriva has been verbally saying they're different but in reality they are the same old dog that had to beg for money. I am concerned about their long term success because there is always a spark of potential in the distro. Marketable potential. Wait. My taxi is here. Oh, no, I mean my bus. No, I think it's a horse cart. Train, maybe??

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Gotta agree with Iphitus...

Since I discovered Arch Linux (which, for granted, isn't for the newbie, but then every user with a little more than basic Linux experience can handle perfectly well) I was just toying back with Mandriva, to find out that its both annoying and stuffed with idiotic bugs.

As-it-is now Mandriva has no place anywhere: On production servers CentOS, Sarge and Slack are way better choices, and on desktop one can find a very wide range of available FREE solutions (ranging from braindead - Mepis to advanced - Arch) which do everything faster, cleaner, and with less bugs. And in the middle of the road there are PCLinuxOS, Vector, (K)ubuntu, Kanotix... all of them being more than a match for poor Mandriva. Even OpenSuSE, with all its annoyances, seems a better way to go right now.

Edited by scarecrow
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Guest johnevans

I'm at the other end of the spectrum, I guess. I've used CentOS, debian, ubuntu, fedora core, RH {6,7,8,9}, Scyld (a redhat variant for clusters) and SuSe, and none of them have been as pleasing to work with as Mandriva on desktops, servers, and laptops. Mandriva just seems to hit the sweet spot with me in terms of striking the best balance. Yes, there are warts, but I'll be staying put. Suse is the distribution I'd never consider again.

 

To each his own.

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I keep looking at other distros and always seem to come back to mandy. Now I'm using 2006, but I am reading up few other distros, like fedora centOS and Arch. So if I decide to change again, I won't come running back. But now for me, I'm so used to Mandy and it works for me, so I'm not real motivated to move. I just don't have the time to play with learning the ins and outs of other distros.

 

But I'm not planning to go to 2007, when it comes out. So I guess its 2006 or bust for me.

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The ONLY solution is to CHANGE the Mandriv's Management. Just let the faithful developers bringing an Open Source Gates-like managers, who know what the desktop folks all over the world need ...

 

Thanks a lot.

Mandriva Linux fan.

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