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Ashamed of Mandriva?


arctic
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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 :)

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Ian is a normadic linux user :D :P

 

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!!!!" :)

Edited by Artificial Intelligence
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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)

 

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

 

ciao!

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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.
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. :mellow:

 

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. ;)

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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.

Edited by scarecrow
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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 :lol: - they prefer tools to config files.

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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 :lol2: :lol2: . 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.

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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

 

Q. I have a problem with xxx

A. RTFM

 

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.

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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.

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- 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.

 

:D

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  • 1 month later...

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. :lol2:

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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. :sad: luckily at that time adam useally popups up (he must watch a lot of blogs and forum for mandriva to be mentioned)

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