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Mandriva and the others ...


fahd
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Hi everybody there!

 

I have been using linux for more than 8 years, before that period I used os/2 and microsoft windows as well. I stll believe that linux is the best choice for free people, who believe in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Let speak frankly about the good product and payment. If I want to obtain a good stuff software (Linux OS) I have to pay. Of course less than microsoft product license policy. But in general, all of us (my colleagues, office workers, my friends and of course me) here in Budapest have decided, that the realtivly best two linux distros are: Mandriva Linux and SuSE linux(Open SuSE).

Unfortunatly, in the last one year, Mandriva(Mandrake) have not made any serious innovation or even obvious developements in it is packages. The difference between the n and n+1 versions is shown up in the KDE, GNOME, Kernel and some apps. If this is the case why did not they include them in their Source Updates?

I wish Mandriva will not disappoint their fans all over the world. Just think of this, Microsoft is going to ship their pride, Vista. Don't forget that the majority of desktop OS users are still using Microsoft products. If we definitely like to allure them to Linux world, we should make more and more radically improvements, innovations, less buggy product and brill look-and-fell desktop environment. At my job I often struggle (as system admin) with the system users to convince them using Linux. I always get the same question: Which Linux distro is the best for us?Among the large scale of Linux distros I have given a try are: PCLinux OS, Arch Linux, Ark Linux, Ubuntu, Open SuSE, Fedora. Believe it or not, the ONLY Linux distro that meet our needs and testified to be our favourite distro is Mandriva Linux.We are completely tired of everlasting probing Linux distros to get the best. We here at my job are agree in that, why should we often seek for the excellent Linux distro, whereas Mandriva Linux renders a great help for us.Mandriva Linux is the uniqe product we always return back to. This does not mean that I degrade the other Linux distros (above mentioned ones). The desktop OS folks use Microsoft because they like it, we here in Hungary like Mandriva Linux because it is very simple and useful, it does a lot of things we desire to see on our computers, though it is not flawless. Thanks guys.

 

Fahd

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Mandriva has the basics right: they have a great package manager (urpmi), their hardware detection is the best, and the mix between stability and running bleeding edge software is right. Mandriva 2006 is just about the best Linux distro I've used (for desktop, PVR, music server so can't speak for other uses). If I want to run the latest software there are people like Thac and Ze or MCNL who build the latest packages (or I can run cooker) plus I get stability. Between kernel upgrades my uptime run sin months and that's desktop use. I've always managed to crash my system running other OSs but Mandriva 2006 just keeps running.

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Mandriva has the basics right: they have a great package manager (urpmi), their hardware detection is the best, and the mix between stability and running bleeding edge software is right.

 

You're damn right about that. I've been using Mandriva, SuSE and Fedora Core. Fedora Core is a cool OS, but I'm very disappointed about yum, the package manager of Fedora Core. yum is so damn slow. If I want to do a single query from the database to find an application that I need, I call yum from the console (or command line, whatever you want to call it) with the package name. Let's say that I mistyped the name of the application, it takes like 15-30 second from yum to say that no packages found, when urpmi gives me the same answer in about 2-10 seconds with the same hardware. I don't know how urpmi does this (does it load itself to memory?), but it's pretty fast. Same thing when I want to install some package.

 

Mandriva's hardware detection is almost as good as M$ windoze's, as far as I have seen. I've never had problems when installing Mandriva to my computers (and some friends computers too). Of course it has problems sometimes, but compared to xp, it's nothing to worry about.

 

Only thing that I've been wondering about are those Linux comparisons in some magazines. They rate Mandriva as the last one because it's "unstable", it's package manager is worse than what SuSE, Ubuntu and some others have and it's slow. And of course they say that hardware support is only mediocre.

 

I don't mean that others are worse than Mandriva, but in my opinion, it's the best one that I have used so far.

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I've never found Mandrake/Mandriva to be unstable and I've used it since 8.1. It's also great at hardware detection as mentioned. I've used it on three different boxes without a prob. And I've had two different printers and a wireless Nic, that I've installed and it's had the drivers for all of them. I have it on my daughter's machine because it's so easy to use.

 

But I do have to disagree with one thing. I don't particularly care for urpmi and I find Gentoo's package manager, emerge to be much better and Gentoo's portage (package repository) has many more programs than Mandriva. Sorry, just being honest. :P

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First, Mandy isn't unstable, unless you use Cooker.

It's just buggy.

Second, urpmi is surely better than yum or the horrid yast, but still it's far from being the best RPM manager out there. Either a tuned apt4rpm/synaptic or Smart Package Manager are much preferrable (and I avoid mentioning "emerge" or "pacman", because they are ages better, but not usable, both of them, under an RPM distro...).

Third, Mandy IS slow, factly second slowest after SuSE... even the "just" i486 tuned Slackware or the i386 tuned Debian Sarge are rocket fast, compared to it.

Fourth, its hardware recognition compared to Knoppix/Kanotix is simply below par.

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Unfortunatly, in the last one year, Mandriva(Mandrake) have not made any serious innovation or even obvious developements in it is packages. The difference between the n and n+1 versions is shown up in the KDE, GNOME, Kernel and some apps. If this is the case why did not they include them in their Source Updates?

That's not true. I'm not a cooker ML reader but I know about their boot optimisation system pinit and they new LivCD building program which replaced mklivecd and was used to build One. Thats only two and I'm not really following this.

 

Hate to say this but IMO Mandriva only was stable. The reason I'm on PCLOS now is that fantastic new Xorg (which was updated from the official updates) gave up on me.

 

SMART can be installed on any RPM based distro? If so, yum, yast, etc. aren't unavoidable problems.

In fact I just installed smart on FC5, because yum, though good in concept, is very slow indeed.

Smart can be installed to a lot of other distros too because it's able to handle Debian repos too.

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I remember a long discussion about urpmi versus the rest from a couple of months ago so I won´t go there, however any package manager that let´s me install a complete new version of KDE, xorg, and qt in one go in about 20 minutes (that includes download time) is perfect to me. I´m sure they can optimize it more, make it run faster but I doubt they can improve on it´s functionality.

 

Emerge: takes to much time. I want to install KDE in 15 minutes

Pacman: it only has to deal with a few 1000 packages. Llet´s see how it scales to repo´s with 10000 of packages.

 

The only buggy feature i can remember in Mandriva 2006 was Kat. All the things I do with my PC work better then ever.

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Fahd,

 

Your post sounds like you think this board is run by Mandriva. It's not, we're only linked by the name and this board is run independently of Mandriva.

 

Just thought I'd say it :P

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Emerge: takes to much time. I want to install KDE in 15 minutes

 

Maybe so but all I have to do to upgrade kde is emerge sync and emerge -uD world. If there's a newer version it is automatically installed and the old version removed. If I want the latest version of KDE such as kde3.5.1 (I go ~x86 which is stable but not stable enough for x86) I add the kde packages I have installed in package.keywords. I do that with my install and never have to touch it again.

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Emerge: takes to much time. I want to install KDE in 15 minutes

 

Maybe so but all I have to do to upgrade kde is emerge sync and emerge -uD world. If there's a newer version it is automatically installed and the old version removed.

 

Emerge only just got upgrade capabilities? :o :P :P

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I ran a retail copy of SuSE once for about a year. I have to agree that YAST had problems. As far as bleeding edge, I remember when the first supermount attempts were worse than kat! In fact, I turned supermount off for at least three versions until I was satisfied it would actually work. (I used to call it supergoof) My point is that linux does not spend years working on something and configuring it (and stealing it from others) before it shows up like windows. New ideas come out when they are "close" to ready. That's because the community makes it ready. But, this gives the impression that "bleeding edge" is not there becuase you've seen it before. It is there; you're in it!! :lol: All of the recent "inovations" in windows have come from linux/unix. Only their method of preventing a user from controlling their own software on their own computer is strictly Microsoft.

 

The good news is that, when I ran Mandrke 7.0, many linux folk looked down upon gui lovers (like me!) That has definitely changed. Gui is in and it is in linux. Mandriva and Suse do represent a very gui-ish type of distro, and that is what people want; not windows, but gui. B)

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If there's a newer version it is automatically installed and the old version removed.

hm...this is one of the main features of all package managers. remove old, add new. it's called updating. you can do it in just about every distro, and faster than in gentoo mind you. gentoo just uses a rolling release so you're always getting the most recent version, instead of holding off version changes (3.4->3.5) for point releases (2005->2006). any distro with rolling release cycles does it the same way as gentoo - gentoo isn't unique here, nor was it the originator of rolling release cycles.

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Nice, we went into a package manager war. Now, I will try to correct something:

 

Package managers: ALL are usable and do their job. Everyone has his preferences and will dislike other package managers, but this is mainly due to the fact that a user normally knows one package manager better than any other. Someone who praises apt-get will probably know it very well and diss e.g. urpmi because it works differently and he does not know all the tricks.

 

YUM: That said, saying that yum is slow validates my point. Yum ain't slow, if you know how to work with it. Sure, it lacks some finetuning-options that urpmi has (or... i haven't found those tricks yet), but it is not slower than apt-get or urpmi or ... It is DIFFERENT. ;)

Yum syncs everytime it is run to the mirrors, thus always grabbing the latest information from the mirrors. So, running "yum udate" is like running "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" as one command. The syncing can be turned off and then, yum is much, much faster (it ain't slow with the syncing enabled, btw.) What is nice with yum, is that you can add it with one click to your system-services and the system will automatically update your box e.g. once a day).

 

Mandriva: Yes, the core is rock-stable, but the apps upon it got increasingly buggy. I got more lockups in 2006 than in any previous release. (10.1 was the best release imho) Firefox, Media players, Cameras crashing, CD's stalling, X dead, I went through it all. And it made me sad. Mandriva was once something where I thought "Hard to beat for a desktop system", but now, this is not really true any more. I hope they will learn from this buggy release and add more innovation, stability and ease of use in future releases.

 

(It was hard not to comment on the Management, but I managed it! I kept it technical. Wow. :) )

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