spinynorman Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Linux.org managing editor Michael J. Jordan takes a look at the most popular (according to distrowatch.com) Linux distributions and gives his opinion as to where he thinks they're going as of January 2007. Apparently, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Linspire and Xandos are on the rise; Mepis and Suse are holding their own; Debian and Mandriva are on the way down... More at Linux Online. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Sounds a bit like his opinions are more based on some fuzzy "cool cred" of the distros rather than anything technical or factual about what they're delivering this year. And he's very harsh on Mandriva - I would have thought that their use of the 3d desktop stuff with 2007 (one of the first live distros to demo that Aiglx/Xgl stuff?), and the new Metisse stuff (exclusive to Mandriva?) would have cut them some slack. Seems very harsh to just label it "irrelevant" without saying why. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Pretty funny, especially as some corrections have to be made: 1) How can a distro, that Ubuntu is based of (and Ubuntu gets an A+ by him) be that much inferior in the ranking? That is imho contradictionary. And: ...the delays are being caused by political issues rather than than technical ones. is a wrong statement. Of course there were political disputes (name it: money), but the main reason why it got delayed was/is e.g. the fixing needed for Xorg and the graphical installer. They are squashing out the last 80 bugs that they deem release-critical for a stable release. And stable means in this case "rock-stable", not "pretty stable". 2) The same thing applies for Mandriva. Although there are problems with Mandriva as a company, its distro cannot be THAT inferior to PCLinuxOS, which - again - is based off Mandriva linux. And Mandriva being irrelevant is nonsense. 3) Fedora is not a beta-distribution, as he claims, but a bleeding-edge distribution with a focus on new technology. It is VERY rare that they ship any beta-versions of applications. But then, new technology is always beta for some people before it becomes mainstream. ;) 4) Linspire and Xandros on the rise: Where? Show me the facts, please. :huh: At least not in Germany or Spain or Austria or .... Hardly anyone uses it outside of the US, I guess. I know a lot more people using Arch, Gentoo, Debian or Slackware, even BSD (!) in Europe than I know of people using Linspire or Xandros. :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Distrowatch rankings themselves are next to irrelevant in a dictionary since they only really track what people who go to distrowatch are tracking...and click on... this then captures a lot of those looking for a n00b distro... Conversely and arguably more relevant is http://distrorankings.com/ where you need to care enough to vote. Then the next way of gaugeing distro popularity is sales which is then totally distorted towards paid-only distro's... This may perhaps indicate why paid-distro's are on the rise if this is how you choose to measure them. The distrowatch figures for "hard core" distros like Debian, Arch or Gentoo are always low.. mainly because the people using those distro's don't give a rat's ass what distrowatch says... As for Mandriva being irrelevant that depends mainly how you define it... I can agree in some ways because its not really doing anything noone else is while drastically falling in popularity... Ubuntu might be best defined as very popular and so if nothing else its relevant... even though its not doing anything Debian isn't.. and this makes it relevant in itself. Mandriva is just a mix of different stuff, most of which "mostly works" .. from hardware which might work in any one release to wizards that probably work so long as you don't want to do anything the wizards fall-over on. It makes it very hard to give a good reason why to use Mandriva over say Ubuntu.or Suse.. probably the best thing about Mandriva being this forum. URPMI is OK if you really want to use a RPM based distro but its not up to apt... etc. and the 3D stuff seems to be causing more problems than making people happy. It sounds harsh but he has a point.. and maybe metisse will be a killer app to change this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Now that I finally have replaced my hard drive, (thanks, RadioEar!) I'm loading several distros to play with. I guess I'll see for myself. I am not sure that "irrelevant" is a good term for such an article. As already observed, why would PCLinuxOS be good and not Mandriva, as PCLinux is Mandriva based? For that matter, while I have used Ubuntu and found it fine, I do not see how it rates "super neato keen" above everyone else. Actually, distrowatch is rather irrelevant, isn't it? ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 (edited) Distrowatch is entirely irrelevant, it is not a reliable source for statistics, as it's methods of operation tend to bias distributions that release more often, and thus get more clicks. Rolling distributions who release snapshots very infrequently like Arch, are disadvantaged. Distrorankings is crap too. Again it is biased to a different type of community. It can be broken if a distribution actually puts emphasis on it: "Vote for us here!" -- And as you can see in the top 10, that's been done. There was a discussion on it on the Arch forums a few months ago, and the general consensus was, who cares? To us using the distro, it doesnt matter what that site says. It's just a silly popularity contest. I've said it before though, Mandriva will become irrelevant if they don't change their ways. * Better documentation * Change of development style, actually use the bug tracker, fix bugs * Better testing * Properly utilise their assets, urpmi and tools. Revamp where needed * Don't go off and do things "Mandriva ways". We all remember how Kat sucked. Why didnt they just write a KDE beagle frontend? * Community. Reach out to them. * As a business: Customer service. As for PCLinuxOS? Remember, just because it's Mandrake based, doesnt mean it's the same. Mandriva is Red Hat based, Ubuntu is Debian based... you get the idea. It's diverted a long way from it's base and has had plenty of time to do the things above that Mandriva doesnt. As for Debian? That guy's got no idea, and uses false logic to mark it on the downfall. James Edited February 3, 2007 by iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dexter11 Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Now that I finally have replaced my hard drive, (thanks, RadioEar!) I'm loading several distros to play with. I guess I'll see for myself. I am not sure that "irrelevant" is a good term for such an article. As already observed, why would PCLinuxOS be good and not Mandriva, as PCLinux is Mandriva based? For that matter, while I have used Ubuntu and found it fine, I do not see how it rates "super neato keen" above everyone else. Actually, distrowatch is rather irrelevant, isn't it? ;) PCLinuxOS comes out as an English live CD only, it's KDE centric and has about the third of packages as Mandriva. That's already leaving out a lot of possibilities for bugs. On top of that though the dev team is small but committed they take stability seriously and they fix the bugs whichstill remained in the actual Mandriva releas. And they can be found on their forum. The key thing is in "offspring distros" can be better than their parent distro is they can fix remaining bugs. They have a small team and react faster to changes. This applies to PCLinuxOS too. I don't know what would happen with it without Texstar. Mandriva is Red Hat based Mandriva is not Redhat based. It was when it first came out but a lot of things has changed since then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 (edited) Mandriva is not Redhat based. It was when it first came out but a lot of things has changed since then. Yes but it still inherits some of the things that just don't make the grade. I agree completely that it has changed a lot but my problem is in terms of relevance. I honestly just don't see 10 top reasons to use Mandriva ... something you can say "Oh with those criteria Mandriva is clearly your best bet" or anything close.... Indeed inmany way's Mandriva has a distro has suffered progressively with every further step taken away from RH...because it used to be a "better for some" version of RH... and now its a "It might be OK for ya" distro... Even the best parts of Mandriva (for me urpmi) is actually half hidden away... so it just fails to distinguish itself in any way... and for everything it aims to be there is another better distro... for that specific aim. I think all round its falling into "jack of all trades, master of non" PCLinuxOS for instance is relevant, (IMHO) I might not choose to use it but its still relevant because it fixes the bugs and hardware is more consistent which brings me back to my old rant... and the main tech problem with Mandriva which is consistency... We can review any version of Mandriva and its largely irrelevant because you can't say the next version will work the same way. 2006 worked outa the box for me, 2007 didn't on the same HW installed along side. My prob is I could probably with not too much messing got it working but I just didn't see the point. its pretty sad but that's the feeling it gives me... if this had been a different distro giving me some probs I would have probably persisted but I was just left feeling "why bother"... so in many ways the quote about it being "irrelevant" sorta puts this into words for me... Edited February 3, 2007 by Gowator Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Although Mandriva has not the huuuuge userbase it once had, its following is still significant, thus the term "irrelevant" is less than accurate. It is a misconception of things. Really. A distro that actually became irrelevant is e.g. Yellow Dog. Once the Mac-Linux distro, it is now trying to switch to the PS3, but... who installs Linux on a PS3 for money??? :huh: Or take e.g. the once promising Yoper. Fast, flashy, very popular. Now it is an almost dead project. That one really became irrelevant, as its speed advantage is gone, new isos don't hit the mirrors. Its once rather big following is now almost nonexistant. As long as Mandriva has hundreds of thousands of downloads with every new release, I wouldn't call them irrelevant. Stagnating is a more proper description of their situation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 As long as Mandriva has hundreds of thousands of downloads with every new release, I wouldn't call them irrelevant. Stagnating is a more proper description of their situation. True, but it just rang a bell with me... Its hard to describe what's missing but I just didn't feel strongly enough about trying it to mess about for more than 5 mins... I guess if the install had worked I would have tried it (and I left it installed thinking I'd have a look later) but it just didn't give me any reason why I would want to... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Hehehe... I can understand you. :D For a seasoned Linux user, it is hard to find something that really makes a distro that unique and the distro to use. For many people, it is the MCC. For you and me, the MCC is not that important as we are used to doing things from the cli. Thus we don't care as much about the new Mandriva-releases as we used to do some years ago. That said, although I use Debian now primarily, I still have Mandriva 2007 on my lappy. It works quite well there and I can take a look at it in order to help others on this forum, especially if there are questions about the MCC or other Mdv specific things that I don't have/use on my Debian systems. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Hehehe... I can understand you. :D For a seasoned Linux user, it is hard to find something that really makes a distro that unique and the distro to use. For many people, it is the MCC. For you and me, the MCC is not that important as we are used to doing things from the cli. Thus we don't care as much about the new Mandriva-releases as we used to do some years ago. That said, although I use Debian now primarily, I still have Mandriva 2007 on my lappy. It works quite well there and I can take a look at it in order to help others on this forum, especially if there are questions about the MCC or other Mdv specific things that I don't have/use on my Debian systems. ;) Yep that's it.... I just didn't find anything I found exciting or a reason to persist... Its not like there is anything serious wrong... just nothing to inspire me... even Linspire is more inspriring somehow even though I don't use it... Regarding the MCC even though I don't like Suse for other reasons its still a pale shadow to YaST... but perhaps I'm just getting old and boring :D I don't know if its just my experience but I used to be excited about what would be new in a new Mandr* release and now I just hope it works first install... that never used to bother me :D I'm hoping Metisse will provide that interest and pull Mandriva out of that box I have which is "not interested" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Mandriva's changed a lot since it started, but that doesnt change the fact it was forked off Red Hat. Anyway, that was my point, PCLinuxOS has changed a lot too, and thus, it's really an independent distro of Mandriva now, and doesnt need it to survive. Was based on it yes, but has changed a lot since. Mandriva aren't irrelevant *yet* but they will be unless they change their ways. I wouldnt reccomend Mandriva as a first distro, because it's just so terribly buggy, and a terrible experience. James Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dexter11 Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 http://www.happyassassin.net/2007/02/03/whats-new-pussycat/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fahd Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 Pretty funny, especially as some corrections have to be made: 1) How can a distro, that Ubuntu is based of (and Ubuntu gets an A+ by him) be that much inferior in the ranking? That is imho contradictionary. And: ...the delays are being caused by political issues rather than than technical ones. is a wrong statement. Of course there were political disputes (name it: money), but the main reason why it got delayed was/is e.g. the fixing needed for Xorg and the graphical installer. They are squashing out the last 80 bugs that they deem release-critical for a stable release. And stable means in this case "rock-stable", not "pretty stable". 2) The same thing applies for Mandriva. Although there are problems with Mandriva as a company, its distro cannot be THAT inferior to PCLinuxOS, which - again - is based off Mandriva linux. And Mandriva being irrelevant is nonsense. 3) Fedora is not a beta-distribution, as he claims, but a bleeding-edge distribution with a focus on new technology. It is VERY rare that they ship any beta-versions of applications. But then, new technology is always beta for some people before it becomes mainstream. ;) 4) Linspire and Xandros on the rise: Where? Show me the facts, please. :huh: At least not in Germany or Spain or Austria or .... Hardly anyone uses it outside of the US, I guess. I know a lot more people using Arch, Gentoo, Debian or Slackware, even BSD (!) in Europe than I know of people using Linspire or Xandros. :P I agree with you in every word. I personally gave pc-linux, linspire and xandros distros a try, and i was disappointed in every manner. Linspire did not recognize my ethernet card, besides it modified the master-boot record for the my 3 harddisks. Xandros did not support the hungarian language, and adsl related issues were found. PC-linux is another lie in linux world. It does not worth to talk about. So Mandriva linux is the only beloved linux distro among the others, despite that there are a lot of things that should be taken in consideration by the company. Thanks. Fahd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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