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What did Mandriva do to make everyone hate them?


iceyintel
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I have a question, what happened to mandriva? i only been a user of it since 2008.1 release, but it seems like when i mention it other people look at it as a negative.Also, looking at distro watch, mandriva fell from number one all the way down to 9, then currently this year it climbed back up a little to 7.

 

If you look here, http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major , the cons of mandriva are not technical issues, they are all company wise.

 

What did mandriva do to lose its popularity and momentum?

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Distrowatch stats are worthless and aren't worth looking at. All that represents is people who click the link to Mandriva on distrowatch's website. Distrowatch is also biased against Mandriva and very rarely write anything nice to say.

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Well, distrowatch is (or better: was for a very long time) biased against Mandriva because Mandriva once had the "club" which was available only to powerpack-users. And in powerpack, there were proprietary drivers and codecs included that the "free" users "had" to install themselves. This was seen as some kind of elitism or snobbishness by people like L. Bodnar that "doesn't belong to linuxland". But in reality, most distros do not ship with proprieteary stuff so this was and is a complete nonsense-argument against Mandriva.

Then, some people were not happy with the yearly release cycle that Mandriva switched to for a short period of time because they could no longer play with the latest and greatest. Thus some users switched to other, more up-to-date distros (others switched because "mandriva" sounded "gay" to them :huh:). Mandriva was/is not the only distro that had a "rather bad" reputation for being "outdated" back then. Debian was considered some kinda dinosaur, Slackware was too conservative.

Distrowatch was/is known for being biased against several distributions. Among them are Novell/SUSE, Mandriva, and more recently Gentoo.

 

Do I care about Mr. Bodnars personal preferences? Nope. B)

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If you wanna judge a distro's reputation you should get info from more sources. I see new users on the official forum frequently. Read about several new fan sites opening. And they had some very good releases, Mandriva 2008 Spring is probably one of the best they ever made. Community support and the reputation has dramatically changed positively since Adam Williamson arrived. All the decisions of the company were community friendly lately.

Hardly the signs of declining. IMHO that's an old article and should be rewritten. The only valid point there is the website. It's still chaotic but as I read in the forum the curent club website will be phased out. I proposed several times to use this forum as an official forum but it didn't happen for reasons unknown to me and likely won't happen.

As for distrowatch ranking, I can't really remember the last time Mandriva was first there. Probably it was still Mandrake. Ever since Mandriva was around the 7th place. Some times better sometimes worse. It tends to go up whenever a new release is out. And it tends to go down slowly afterwards.

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Whatever Ladislav's opinion has been in the past, it is in the past. I don't see any current negativity or bias against Mandriva, if there is please point it out. I can't see outdated opinions being anymore indicative of Ladislav's bias than the Distrowatch rankings being indicative of popularity (given that they are worthless, as verified by our independent adjudicators).

Edited by Reiver_Fluffi
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We lost #1 rank in the DW six month chart around 2005 or 2006, if I recall correctly.

 

I wouldn't say DW has ever been 'biased' against Mandriva, in the sense of determined to judge it (and us) negatively no matter what the evidence. I would say that Ladislav considered some of the moves Mandrake/Mandriva made around that same time (2004 through 2006) to be bad ones, and said so, which is of course his prerogative on his own site. It's never been the case that DW is intended to be some utterly impartial fount of inarguable wisdom. It's as much an opinion site as an information one. In the last couple of years we (myself and others at Mandriva) have had good contact with Ladislav, and he - as far as I can judge - now considers that the company and distro are both moving in more positive directions, and his coverage since then has reflected that opinion.

 

In general what happened to Mandriva was a) Ubuntu, b) OpenSUSE, c) bad management of the user community, and d) an iffy string of releases. The first two were nothing we could do much about, but the last two were.

 

There was a huge sea change in the Linux world around 2004 - 2005, when Ubuntu showed up, and Novell bought out SUSE and opened it up.

 

Prior to that, the big names in the end-user distro world were Red Hat, SUSE, and Mandrake. And Gentoo for a bit, but that was more a fad than anything else. Debian was where it always is - a little out to the side. I'm ignoring it for the purpose of this discussion.

 

What Red Hat, original-SUSE, and Mandrake all had in common is they were independent companies producing commercial Linux distributions and depending on them to survive. Red Hat and Mandriva still are, but Mandriva is the only survivor of that initial trio which still relies to any significant extent on selling products to individual end-users. Red Hat has built a massive, and very successful, business selling thousands of units of corporate products to large customers. That's what they do now, and they're great at it. They don't sell an end-user distro any more. They sponsor the development of Fedora, I believe, for three reasons: a) for the development benefits it provides, b) for mindshare in the still to some extent enthusiast-driven Linux community, and c) because, honestly, I think the leaders of Red Hat are decent people who remember where the company came from and still think it's a cool thing to make a good desktop product. Anyhow. Point is, they're not in the same market as us any more. That was the first big change.

 

The next one is what happened to SUSE. SUSE, when it was independent, was the closest competitor to Mandrake, but Mandrake was bigger in most places (SUSE always had a strong foothold in Germany, naturally). And SUSE was actually more restrictive and closed than Mandrake ever was. SUSE development was almost entirely closed and done within the company, there was little external input. They didn't really have a development testing community. They didn't even release free ISOs; you either bought SUSE, or went through a fairly painful network installation process to install it from the public repos.

 

Novell bought it out and completely changed it. For Novell, desktop Linux is not a money earner, it's a loss leader. They don't make money selling SUSE boxes, although they still do it just because a few die hards want them. They spend far more developing OpenSUSE than they make back selling anything to regular end users. Why? More or less the same reasons as Red Hat, actually. They use it as a development project for SLES and SLED, which they do make money selling (or, at least, they genuinely try to, it's one of their business goals). It also builds mindshare around their other enterprise products - it gives them an in with people. Anyway, why is less important than what. As I said, they totally opened up SUSE. It went from being the most closed commercial Linux to being more open than Mandrake, overnight, because Novell didn't need it to make money. They needed it to make a big splash.

 

And finally, Ubuntu came along. Ubuntu's initial business model was (and mostly, still is) 'spend Mark Shuttleworth's money'. I'm not complaining, but making an important point. Just like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu didn't need to make money. The point of Ubuntu was more or less the opposite - it was to do as much as possible and give it all away for free. To as many people as possible.

 

So the leading Linux desktop distros went from Mandrake, Red Hat, and independent SUSE - of which Mandrake was the most popular and the most open, having an open development process, and releasing free ISOs to the public on a short delay after the Club / PWP release - to Mandrake, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE, of which Mandrake was suddenly the *least* open. That didn't make us look too good by comparison, but it's a big change to have to try and adjust to overnight. What we had to adjust to was a fundamental shift in the market. Prior to Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, people would pay to run Linux. You could, fundamentally, make money selling software to Linux users. We and SUSE had both done it, successfully. Once Ubuntu and OpenSUSE were around, it became very difficult. It's hard to sell someone a $99 distribution when they can get pretty much the same stuff elsewhere, for free.

 

This was only made worse by the fact that this change unfortunately coincided with some, frankly, sloppy releases of Mandrake/Mandriva. 10.2, 2006, and - to some extent - 2007 were not very good releases, in my opinion (which was my opinion at the time as well as today, and that's on public record in various places). They all released with significant bugs. Our quality control was not great. This only made the comparison with the shiny new Ubuntu and OpenSUSE - and other distros around at the time - worse. Suddenly, instead of a choice of three commercial distros, people had a choice of one somewhat sloppy distro which we were still actively trying to get people to buy, or two that were basically totally free, and in some ways were, honestly, better. If you grab an emulator and compare, say, Mandriva 2005 with Ubuntu 5.04, or Mandriva 2006 with Ubuntu 5.10, you'll see what I mean. Early Ubuntu releases lacked a whole ton of features - all sorts of stuff Mandriva can do - but at the time, our presentation and release quality were slapdash, and there were some significant differences from the Mandriva of today. We still didn't have a public non-free repository; only PWP owners or Club members got the proprietary packages - like NVIDIA and ATI drivers, wireless firmware, Flash, Java...all those things you could get very easily for Ubuntu. Those Ubuntu releases were very minimalistic but they also had very high release quality. They shipped a great looking and great feeling product that simply didn't have obvious bugs. There were lots of things it couldn't do, but it just felt nicer than the Mandrake releases of the time.

 

And finally, as I said, there was the user community management issue. Again, at the time, Mandrake/Mandriva still basically had a commercial company mindset. We still distinguished substantially between customers and users, and treated them differently. This was nothing unusual at the time, and we were less harsh about this than Red Hat or independent-SUSE. But as soon as Ubuntu and OpenSUSE showed up, our position started to look very bad. People realized that the distinction didn't happen with OpenSUSE or Ubuntu (or some other distros). Everyone was a user; someone who didn't pay was valued as much as someone who did (of course, no-one COULD pay for Ubuntu).

 

So, yeah, the history is really pretty simple; there was a big confluence of factors around 2004-2005 that changed the Linux desktop sector completely, and we were in pretty much the worst position out of anyone who survived (lots of companies went under around then). We had to figure out a way to be an independent company which exists in order to produce a distribution for regular people, in a sector where it didn't make any sense to pay for a desktop Linux distribution any more. That was, and is, tough, and is basically the root of all the problems Mandriva had at the time.

 

I don't think there was anything particular unfair in the public response to Mandriva, however tough conditions were and still are for us. The fact is, it doesn't matter to a user what the market conditions are. People were just looking at the products they had available and drawing a conclusion that Mandriva was no longer the best for them. Which was perfectly rational, for a lot of people.

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interesting and thanks adam.

 

But just one question

 

How the hell did Xandros survive?Although i am looking into their product line deciding if i shoudl go with Mandriva 2009 Powerpack, Xandros, or Vector linux SOHO, how did they survive against these free distros.They look like the most closed distro, with all their products being commercial, and then they do give me the feeling of them being a true commerical company, and more closed then mandriva.Just compare websites, and you will see what i mean.They have a security suite which i think you have to pay for, then they ask you if you would like to buy microsoft parent protection or whatever the hell it is before you buy got $50.

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IIRC, Xandros survives because they - like Red Hat - concentrated on the business market quite early and still do have enough paying customers there. Xandros is often mentioned in reviews (at least in german Linux magazines) as a good alternative to Red Hat and praised for its good data-exchange with Windows machines.

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IIRC, Xandros survives because they - like Red Hat - concentrated on the business market quite early and still do have enough paying customers there. Xandros is often mentioned in reviews (at least in german Linux magazines) as a good alternative to Red Hat and praised for its good data-exchange with Windows machines.

 

Their recent collaboration with Asus helped as well.

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During that time period with those "bad" Mandrake distros, that Adam mentioned, I couldn't even use them because they would not recognize my computer's hardware. For a short time I had to use SUSE (I believe - if I remember correctly). I couldn't wait to get back to Mandrake!

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