Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Finally Out 267
ennael writes "We finally did it. Mandriva Linux 2010 is out and comes with many improvements and innovations. We still go on supporting in the same level of integration GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.2. Support for netbooks is improved as users can now easily test Moblin 2.0 environment. 'Smart desktop' coming from European research is now fully integrated and is the first real working semantic desktop. Mandriva Control Center also brings improvements in tools: a new netprofile management tool, a GUI for Tomoyo security framework, and parental control. A big thanks to our community, who worked hard and made this release possible."
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
No I also like Mandriva. Here's to hoping Mandriva 2010 undoes some of the damage caused to the Linux image by the Ubuntu Karmic release SNAFU.
I wouldn't mind seeing Mandriva gain some ground, and some new packages in the process.
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
...considering Mandrivia costs 60 euros and has a MUCH smaller userbase than Ubuntu, which is free and is the de facto desktop distro winner. Shouldn't a linux newcomer just adopt the most supported distro aka Ubuntu?
Mandriva is free, too. Otherwise, you may be right. Ubuntu may be a better distro for a "Linux newcomer". On the other hand, getting support for other distros is not wildly different or inherently worse than getting support for Ubuntu. I hope you realize that Ubuntu might not be everybody's cup of tea, and not everybody is new to Linux. While Ubuntu may be the most popular choice for Linux on the desktop, it is by no means the only practical or best choice for everyone.
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
It had a few questionable releases around the Mandrake/Mandriva switch, but it's very very good now. From what I've seen it's probably one of the best distros for KDE, better than Fedora and Kubuntu.
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Umm... Mandriva is free. You *can* buy it boxed and get some support,etc., but for the average home user it doesn't cost a penny more than Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, or FreeDOS.
It's also still a fairly dominant distro, and in my opinion is a better place to start if you don't want your OS to treat you like a total moron (every time I try and use Ubuntu, it just feels like it's insulting my intelligence). Mind you, for some people that's probably the appropriate design for an OS, but I'm personally quite happy with Mandriva (one of my computers is running 2009 Spring, I may try upgrading it).
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's to hoping Mandriva 2010 undoes some of the damage caused to the Linux image by the Ubuntu Karmic release SNAFU.
Everyone keeps saying that, but... for my home I upgraded a dozen total Ubuntu installs including desktop machines, laptops, virtual machines, file and database servers, MythBuntu frontends and backends... and encountered absolutely no issues. :/ The first I heard of any upgrade problems at all was on Slashdot.
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do too; it makes it easy to do the kinds of things a home user wants to do, without insulting your intelligence, requiring crazy and arcane knowledge, or being overly pushy with the Free Software approach (they offer a F/OSS-only download, but they also offer an ISO with the useful free-as-in-beer proprietary stuff bundled). Their releases are more frequent than openSuse's, I've never had the instability problems that I get with Fedora (seriously, Fedora 10 crashes whenever I manage to connect it to my network, haven't bothered trying it again since then), and I massively prefer its design philosophy and UI over that of Ubuntu.
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:5, Interesting)
I still remember ordering Mandrake and Slackware CD's through the mail because they were too big to download on a 56k connection. For a few dollars any number of companies would burn disks as send them through the mail. It wasn't standard for everyone to have broadband, or to be able to do updates through the Internet. In retrospect, Linux was certainly clumsier, rougher, and less stable on the desktop. A quick spin with Mandrake Linux 7 can show you how radically the Linux desktop experience has changed in the last nine years.
This clumsy user experience was also responsible for turning many Linux geeks away from the "bloated" desktop environments and more toward bare metal distributions such as Slackware and Debian, along with minimalist window managers, xterms, and other such tools. In my case, after struggling with Red Hat and Mandrake, I found the simplicity of Slackware to actually be easier, and lived over in that world for the next 7-8 years until Ubuntu really started to shine. I am sure there are many other Slashdotters who have had similar experiences in their years with Linux.
Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us. (Score:1, Interesting)
I guess I am asking, why is it that such a good, arguably superior, distro seems to have to pull teeth just to get a few scraps of publicity, while some others seem to be living in some sort of reality distortion field?
Critical mass, branding, marketing.
Anyway, I love linux and use it heavily on all our production servers, clusters, etc, and have done so for over 10 years.
However, linux (all distros) still sucks on the desktop, and I think it always will. Printing is unreliable, windows/forms behaviour is inconsistent (default buttons, tab behaviour, etc), the GUI (gnome/kde) is slow unless you have decent hardware, the fonts are terrible, copy/paste between apps is a joke, audio is unreliable (how about having a single driver that works consistently?), etc, etc. Yes, there are workarounds, and yes things are slowly improving, but for fuck sakes, how many more years is it going to take? Surely you cannot expect an average computer user to struggle with this kind of sub-standard nonsense? For the time being, I wish aficionados would stop pretending that Linux-on-the-desktop is ready for prime-time.
The desktop people have had years to sort this basic stuff out, yet their focus is on more features, more flash, prettier colours, more screensavers, as opposed to fixing things (and as much as commercial software sucks in other ways, at least they fix the basic shit -- here the linux kernel and decent server-distro (RH, CentOS, Suse) shines btw, those boys FIX things). Linux on the desktop has such potential, yet they just can't seem to get it right (and Redmond folk are pooping their pants laughing).
Not all distros suck at all of those mentioned, but every one lacks in some way. Sadly, I don't think it will ever be a real quality desktop experience since the developers don't have a financial interest to ensure quality and are not held accountable for their failings, so QA is severely lacking.
If you want to save money and can live with the shortcomings, then by all means use linux on the desktop, otherwise use windows or get a mac. This is my advice to all those folks I deal with on a daily basis and I've yet to be proven wrong (have you tried explaining to a busy professional why printing is not working (or why a print job has to be RE-authorised again and again because Ubuntu is not remembering the password/tick-mark), or why flash is not working in Firefox, or why the sound is crackling (and changing the audio driver back/forth magically solves it), or why the default PDF viewer is Xpdf (which makes me laugh and spill my coffee with it's antiquated X 1990s interface) -- these people don't want to struggle with the basic shit, they want to focus on their job.
I want to believe, but the reality is disappointing.
Yes, all this has been said before, but I believe the more it's said and in more forums, the sooner they'll take notice and do what needs to be done.
Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us. (Score:1, Interesting)
It is definitely a mystery as to why Mandrake (it will always be Mandrake to me) has never gained the publicity of the other distros. There was a period in the early part of the decade (2002-05ish) when it was hands down the best distro around, yet never recieved the attention of say Redhat or Suse.
I moved away from Mandrake when I started working at a big Uni which had its own home grown fork of RedHat (the fork made redhat actually quite good), and I never came back to it. Eventually I found Ubuntu and never looked back.
Mandrake was the first distro that I could get to work properly, and it will always have a place in my heart!
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds very much like my own experiences with Linux.I had a friend/co-worker help me setup a Debian system many years ago but, I never quite "got" Debian and it was very frustrating for me. I continued to run the Debian system for several years and I even tried out Corel Linux with similar results but, after reading about Mandrake(the name back then) I figured it couldn't be any worse so I gave that a try and WOW...all my hardware magically started working and it wasn't too hard for me to setup the system and use it. :)
Now several years later I use Debian on my servers and I'm learning to use the KDE that comes with Debian but, I mostly just the shell/Xterm/CLI on those systems.
This is great timing too because my wife just mentioned earlier tonight that she'd like to try out a Linux system on an old laptop we have here and I have a pretty good idea which Distro we are going to try first
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
They seem to be the only ones who are doing a really good job with KDE4.
Every other distro I've tried has made KDE4 feel like the steaming pile of poo that everyone said it was, but Mandriva made it feel like a really good desktop.
I don't know how they've done that when no-one else seems to be able to, but it does prove that in the hands of a good distributor, KDE4 is actually a very good piece of software. If only the Kubuntu or Suse guys could put in the kind of effort that the Mandriva team have obviously made.
(the irony is that back in the day -- 2005-ish, when I tried Mandrake previously -- I found it one of the worst KDE distros from a look+feel perspective. I'm glad they've turned it around).
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, does kdesu (the graphical privilege-elevation dialog) work yet? The last Kubuntu build I tried had kdesu set up to use `su` not `sudo` (it's a configuration option). Since [K]Ubuntu's root account is disabled by default, it doesn't matter what password you enter - su won't work.
This was a blatantly obvious showstopper bug that requires literally a minute or two to fix. The fact that it shipped in a release version of Kubuntu was where I lost all faith in the distribution's QA efforts.
Re:How does it compare to Ubuntu? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it comes from their ancestors. Debian always preferred Gnome.
Preferring Gnome over KDE is not a failure. It is only something that does not match your desktop environment requirements. Some people like Gnome. Although you might not like KDE either. I don't think that it fits your "rely on to install right, work properly and not throw up a fuss when it comes to installing software, playing music and getting things done" requirements.
anyone installed it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Am I the only one who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mandriva has been my OS of choice since it was Mandrake. I haven't tried Ubantu, hated Fedora (but haven't tried it for a long, long time). Suse was ok but I far prefer Mandriva to any distro I've tried.
I think what I like best about it is the "Mandriva Control Center", they tout it as new, but administration has been easy as pie for years anyway. It just works (at least on hardware I've thrown it on).
I'm leery of the "Smart desktop" technology; if I don't like it I hope it's easy to remove or disable. It's GNU so it probably is, and who knows, I might like it anyway! TFA was really light on details, can anybody here shed more light on what it is, what it does, and how it works?
Hoping for great things (Score:3, Interesting)
2009 Spring with the KDE4 desktop has given me an excellent experience on my Eee 701 with 2GB RAM (tried it with 512MB RAM, it was crashy and slow due to out-of-memory, though Mandriva includes a couple of lighter weight desktops which might be worth trying if you don't have KDE as a requirement!).
It works out-of-the-box on Eee 701 with the hardware well-supported without manual fiddling (a few magic function keys don't work, oh well). It looks nice, it's KDE implementation is nice and polished. It's like running a modern desktop OS, really excellent. My main objection is simply that it doesn't have a vanilla (x)nethack package :-(
I'm very excited to see 2010 and will upgrade to it after giving early adopters a chance to shake out any release bugs ;-)
Mandriva 2008 Spring was the best yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
the one thing that's really improved is kdenlive)
I tried to install Mandriva 2010, but aparently its installer doesn't think my SSD is a harddrive... although all previous mandriva versions installed on it just fine... maybe I'll switch the ports where my harddrives are plugged in - that may change something, but then again i'll have to reinstall grub manually (mandrivas bootloader repair tool never worked for me)
mandriva 2009 was completely unusable with kde 4.1... I think what I'll do soon is using mandriva-online to update my system (although I'd prefer a fresh installation) and if it goes bad, I'll switch back to 2008 Spring...
Re:I think Mandriva is getting a raw deal from us. (Score:3, Interesting)
You ask a good question.
Because of the hype, I have tried Ubuntu many times and keep going back to Mandriva.
I use Ubuntu studio weekly but the polish is not there, and they don't fix bugs quickly.
And give up on using KDE with Ubuntu, it is almost like they try to give a bad experience to bring people back to gnome.
With Mandriva I can use any window manager, I even use ICE every once in a while when I want a light weight GUI.
Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you could learn some statistics and see why an anecdote does not constitute universal data.
Face it, dear Troll, most people are using Ubuntu just fine just as most people are using Mandriva, Fedora and SuSE without problems. People with problematic hardware have long been a minority, and regardless of how angry you may be at being part of it, that won't make them a significant majority nor anyone who hasn't had a problem with it a "fanboy".
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Re:Whichever moron tagged this as "irrelevant"... (Score:3, Interesting)
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Ah, the other half of Slashdot's population have woken up. Morning. ;)
You know, one of my other posts in this thread was at 5, Insightful over night. It's the way it normally happens. My perspective resonates with the few other people here with a brain in their heads, for a couple of hours; and then in the morning there's the arrival of what I'll charitably refer to as, "the blue pill demographic."
Enjoy your 8-16 hours stuck in a 4 foot cubicle. I might even think of you at some point during the day; right before I roll over and go back to sleep. ;)
Creative X-Fi (Score:2, Interesting)
Using mandriva since 2002 (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently about 40 server boxes, about dozen of workstations. Tried other distros many times since 2002, always switched back.
Good job, Mandriva guys!