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Which is better - Ubuntu Or Mandriva?


Guest Jebereuen
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Yes, you are right, but Cooker shows you what will be available soon in Mandriva 2007. And that is KDE 3.5.3 afaik, Gnome 2.16 and the latest Kernel plus the current Firefox and Openoffice. Thus it's a bit ridiculous to say that Ubuntu is more up to date as they will ship almost the same software. After six months - of course - they have newer packages due to faster release cycles, but the difference between both systems is imho rather minimal.

 

If the last release is anything to go by, you can forget Gnome 2.16. 2.12 was released on the second week of September last year, 2.16 will be release at the same time this year. 2006 did not include 2.12 as the version freeze occured the month before and that the final release of 2.12 occured one week before the proposed release date of 2006. This is the same situation with 2007, the versions freeze date occurs before 2.16 is planned for release!

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Cooker already has GNOME 2.15 and I guess they'll backport the bugfixes, don't know when GNOME's feature freeze is though....

@SoulSE: synaptic and apt are available in the repositories for mandriva.

Edited by ffi
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Well I think the fact the repo's in Ubuntu are pre-installed is a BIG plus....as a noobie distro.

As a more experienced noobie its not important but as an initial experience I find Mandriva's non exploitation of one of the best things about the distro somewhat puzzling!

 

:wall::wall::wall::wall::wall: ouch

 

The same goes for wifi drivers etc. Ubuntu more or less just works (or doesn't) have the drivers, I haven't tested since I have a vmware install of mandriva but Im perfectly happy to accept Iphitus' word over this.

 

To be fair the 'current release' of Ubuntu is in testing too. it just seems to me like all the devs only use the current dev release.

As to the forums ... pants for anything technical. If you wanna change the desktop no probs but real technical issues are pretty much ignored unless in the devel release. (in my experience) and in many cases I have aksed the same question here and had it answered 3-4 weeks before anyone even answers the post in Ubuntu forums but having said that this is NOT the offical mandriva forum.... however my last real question before ditching Ubuntu http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=150035 .. as you can see unanswered.

 

I have to say my present 2006 install just feels OLD OLD OLD.... I don't feel like I missed anything of consequence between 10.1 and 2006 ... perhaps stuff has changed but it still has the same stupid star icon and dated look .. but I have to say runs well!

 

MCC? Don't know refuse to risk using it after all my bad experiernces but as most people know i don't think its a great use of devel time reinventing the wheel as a square .... its just a chasing your own tail thing.

 

The main prob with Ubuntu forums is just the lack of experienced people compared to inexperienced and for instance that if you bump someone looks at the time not the date and gets away with nasty comments about bumping because the mods are overworked.

 

However I think this is partly a problem of the forum itself that they are not willing to change. If they had different subforums etc. then searches would find stuff at the right level ... I guess this is partly because they have different concurrent releases and it just ends up experienced people lookiong in the devel release and nobbies in the stable release so if you use the stable release 90% of peoople perhaps 95% are complete noobies ... and the available tools don't help ... posts without reply is pointless and only runs to 999 pages or something so no way to tell how many unanswered posts! View new posts .. same prob, its across releases etc.

 

Specific forums with enthusiasts like AI are probably different because they are enthusiasts....

 

But there's still some things which remain out of date. Like mandriva's use of supermount, and bootsplash. Both are very dated, and havnt been updated/maintained for *years*.
Supermount - agreed. Bootsplash... well it's not pretty but it's only minor eye-candy. A pretty bootsplash is nice, but not something by what I judge a distro.

To be fair Mandriva has a lot of forgotten things... whether these affect YOU is depending what they are but there always seems to be a lot of stuff partially taken out then forgotten.

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Well, Mandriva can't even be the latest/greatest with their yearly releases, but I agree that it feels dated and hasn't changed much since 10.1 or even 10.0.

 

But I chose Mandriva in this debate because I'm a KDE person, Kubuntu sucks and last time I tried it, it was buggy and even when replacing sudo with root, had many errors related to it.

Ubuntu made an unprofessional and unthought of impression. Good if you want to leave it at the defaults, but a bitch if you want to change something.

 

Anyways I'm now quite happy with Fedora Core.

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Cooker already has GNOME 2.15 and I guess they'll backport the bugfixes, don't know when GNOME's feature freeze is though....

@SoulSE: synaptic and apt are available in the repositories for mandriva.

 

It's the same ol story as last year. Even if 2.12 could have been rushed at the time, they wouldn't on the grounds of stability. Just because 2.15 is in cooker, doesn'y mean that it is stable, or that it will make it into the official release come September! I'm only going by the precedence Mandriva set in previous years!

 

Oh and another thing, why include 2.16 in official (including free), when you can make it a club/kiosk option? Ka-ching €€€'s

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To be honest: I still run Gnome 2.10 on Mandy and have Gnome 2.14 on Fedora. Do I miss anything in Gnome 2.10 that 2.14 has? Nope. B) Thus, from a "normal" end-user experience (=no geeks), it might be irrelevant if they ship with Gnome 2.14 or 2.16 in Mdv2007. Only those who constantly feel that they need to live on the cutting edge will probably complain but those aren't the main audience for Mandriva, I guess. Sure, 2.16 would be nice. We will see if they ship it nonetheless. And if they don't include 2.16... I don't care. :rolleyes:

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What would make a difference is if they ship things like NetworkManager and definitely Gnome Power manager. While my experience with network manager hasnt been great, ive seen what it can be setup to do, and looks awesome, well designed and easy to use.

 

Gnome Power manager is just gold on this laptop. This battery/bios doesnt report charge/discharge rates, so most battery monitors just complain and just give me a percentage. But gnome power manager actually looks at the rate at which the charge is goin up/down and calculates a time. It also provides long need options to do things like automatically suspend on low power, what happens when the lid is closed, when to blank the screen, etc. It's also got nice tango'ified icons which look great compared to the dated old battstat applet, and they show a much more useful representation of battery level.

 

James

Edited by iphitus
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Mandriva rarely puts beta software into cooker this far ahead of a release without intending to put the final version of it into said release.

 

Planned final release for GNOME 2.16 is Sept. 6

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Well, Mandriva can't even be the latest/greatest with their yearly releases, but I agree that it feels dated and hasn't changed much since 10.1 or even 10.0.

 

But I chose Mandriva in this debate because I'm a KDE person, Kubuntu sucks and last time I tried it, it was buggy and even when replacing sudo with root, had many errors related to it.

Ubuntu made an unprofessional and unthought of impression. Good if you want to leave it at the defaults, but a bitch if you want to change something.

 

Anyways I'm now quite happy with Fedora Core.

Yep, you can't just add the root password and get rid of the gtksu and kdesu stuff its built into the .deb's

It doesn't feel like its changed a whole lot since 9.x to be honest but stuff has change dint he background ...

What would make a difference is if they ship things like NetworkManager and definitely Gnome Power manager. While my experience with network manager hasnt been great, ive seen what it can be setup to do, and looks awesome, well designed and easy to use.

 

Yep one of by biggest grips with Mandriva is the MCC.... (as everyone knows) and both KDE and Gnome have lots of nice config tools already... and lots of other stuff...

 

kano has just got rid of his own cupsconfig (which used KDE) in favor of the cupsconfig (localhost:631) which I think is a good step... when the tools already exist why duplicate and since the newest cups detects the printer and finds the right driver there is really no need... its just something to maintain that can break ...

 

MCC just duplicates other tools, sometimes badly... and most of it just isn't needed.

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yes mcc is doubling other tools, but someone not familiar with linux surely will apreciate the fact that there is a central configuration system and while mcc is far from perfect it does its job at the moment, has anybody of you really used it lately ?

 

e. g. the drakwizards work just very good at the moment , I never had an easier DNS-Server-setup than on mandriva 2006 (ok it was just the basic setup, to get ddns-updates work I had to hack the config-files, but I'm still impressed)

 

one big problem with mandriva is indeed, they don't advertise their strong points like urpmi, msec etc.

 

and their partition manager is indeed fine, you can even put up a software-raid and lvm at installation-time (shame is, you just have to find it yourself, they don't tell you)

Edited by lavaeolus
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yes mcc is doubling other tools, but someone not familiar with linux surely will apreciate the fact that there is a central configuration system and while mcc is far from perfect it does its job at the moment, has anybody of you really used it lately ?

Not since the disk partitioner trashed my disk .... buit these tools can easily be called from a central place without having to keep rewriting them.

e. g. the drakwizards work just very good at the moment , I never had an easier DNS-Server-setup than on mandriva 2006 (ok it was just the basic setup, to get ddns-updates work I had to hack the config-files, but I'm still impressed)

works direct from apt-get ... but this is a different philosophy.

In Mandriva you sorta choose the task and the wizards install the packages. In debian you need to know the packages but the config is almost always completed...

The difference is you don't know what it downloaded and installed and getting rid of it if you made a mistake can be a pain. I see the point but there are just not enough uninstall options IMHO....

 

 

one big problem with mandriva is indeed, they don't advertise their strong points like urpmi, msec etc.

Agree completely .... the urpmi setup staggers belief and most noobies miss it, by the time thwey have tried downloading a few .tgz's they stumble here and find out.

and their partition manager is indeed fine, you can even put up a software-raid and lvm at installation-time (shame is, you just have to find it yourself, they don't tell you)

Besides my experience ... yep same thing they just don't let users know .. and they have done the work already ??

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for a beginner I believe it is easier to take the task-oriented route, even I don't always know all the package-names, and I think I'm fairly experienced with linux

 

one thing that mandriva misses is a way to check if there are packages that are not needed (e. g. libraries without any dependencies, and if there is a way, as always they don't tell you :D )

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one thing that mandriva misses is a way to check if there are packages that are not needed (e. g. libraries without any dependencies, and if there is a way, as always they don't tell you :D )
Well, that is a problem that many distros share. There are only complicated workarounds for this and they are a bit risky. For Fedora, it looks e.g. like this: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=91966
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Yes this is indeed more a general problem, not only specific to mandriva, I always do a clean base-installation with only the absolutely needed packages included and run "rpm -qa > rpmlist.txt" after, so I have at least a list of all the packages of my base-system and whenever I install something new I can compare the packagelist and know which new packages are on my system

 

to be honest, so far mandriva gave me a far better experience at installing a clean base-system without unneeded clutter than Suse or fedora, but maybe I just know the packages better here

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