Mandriva Goes Out of Business 167
An anonymous reader writes: After struggling for the past several years, Mandriva has finally gone out of business, and is in the process of being liquidated. The company was responsible for Mandriva Linux, itself a combination of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva Linux. When Mandriva fell upon hard times, many of the distro's developers migrated to Mageia Linux, which is still going strong and just putting the final touches on its next major version (5).
The name didn't help. (Score:4, Funny)
Mandriva still sounds like a gay porno.
Re:The name didn't help. (Score:5, Interesting)
They changed the name because of the threat of litigation, and they couldn't afford the proper set of lawyers to tell the plaintiff to f*** off, but they should've changed their name to something that ended in "drake", e.g. "Sandrake." They did have an opportunity when Red Hat abandoned their consumer distro and their shrink wrap product (the two were actually the same) - Mandrake should've stepped in and taken charge. This is when you need a guy who has some marketing savvy (not talking about a business school guy, but someone who knows how to grab press like Michael Robertson for example). They should've said "we have a solution to the problem with non-free drivers" or something like that, even if it turned out to be a hack.
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Since the early day of Mandrake I have had Mandrake/Mandriva as my favorite distro. It is sad to see it go but this is not surprising. One thing I noticed was that their site had been very difficult to navigate in the last few years and their attempts to monetize was crude, at best. These two things are not the reason they went out of business but I do not think they helped in any way. They were my favorite. I am hoping someone forks and continues the project.
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I'll attest to the fact that they fixed many bugs in the redhat installer and other components.
It was a better RedHat in many respects.
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In the 90s, practically every OS had these issues with NICs that weren't Intel 82559 or 3C509 based.
The world is much more networked now, and thus has far better support for networking.
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I used Mandrake/Mandriva from 2000 to around 2013. As far as I know, there are at least three "forks":
Mageia (which I use now: I personally think it's great, and a big improvement on Mandriva): http://www.mageia.org/en/ [mageia.org]
PCLinuxOS: never used it, so can't comment on what it's like: don't know if this is classed as a true "fork": http://www.pclinuxos.com/ [pclinuxos.com]
OpenMandriva: again, never used it, so can't comment, and again, not sure if this is a "fork" as such: https://www.openmandriva.org/e... [openmandriva.org]
Try Mageia: you may we
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I already downloaded and burned Mageia. :D I will install it tomorrow as it is late.
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When Mageia started, I tried it. But I eventually ended up in OpenSUSE. Yeah, I sold out... Never could stomach Ubuntu and it's children.
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My first linux box was Mandrake. A bit of a shame that they are now titsup.
That being said, everything I do is Debian-based now.
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Mandriva still sounds like a gay porno.
You're thinking of Mangina.
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Mandrake was the only distro that I bought [i]boxed[/i].. but I never used it enough to remember what was so special about it. One thing stands out in my memory though: a post in the Slashdot comments to the name change from Mandrake to Mandriva.
Mandriva - Womenshouta!
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Like the new name - "Moregayer" - is any better in that respect.
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>"First time I ever hear of Mageia. It seems like a minor project in comparison to Mandriva..."
Not really. Most of the Mandriva user base, volunteer base, and contributors moved over to Mageia already, which accelerated the death of Mandriva. And I expect even more now.
I believe it has all the same number of packages and features of Mandriva, just completely community driven instead of by a [small] corporation. It is almost 4 years old now. The now defunct Mandriva even started using the Mageia distr
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I am downloading it now. I will see how it goes. I have a PC about a year old that I am not sure why I bought it (I think the i7 and 16GB of RAM for something silly like $400 was the reason - stupid NewEgg making me buy silly things I do not need) but it has never had an OS on it at all - it has never even been plugged in - so I think it will suit for a test. I should journal my results and I may but I may be too lazy for that.
Too bad to see them go this way... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 2002-2004 they were a great distribution; based on Red Hat, but using the optimizations for the 586/686 chipsets they made for a solid platform for LAMP powered systems running on last generation hardware. The support was top-notch for subscribers and when I started pushing out BEOWULF type systems for our computational systems they were right there making it flow.
Farewell Mandrake/Mandriva...
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Yes; as you say, in the 2002--2004 timeframe they were great. My experience was that it all started to fall apart when 64-bit machines came along. For a year or more Mandrake's 64-bit repositories were full of broken packages that simply would not install. I kept with them as long as I could, through the change to Mandriva, but nothing seemed to improve very much so I eventually switched the up-and-coming shininess that was *buntu. Which was great for a few years, before their quality control went the same
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I liked them late 1990s (Mandrake) they were my favorite distribution because so many things "just worked" and their configurations were often more sensible. You started off far closer to a working system.
Didn't try the server product much though did use it once for a RAID product and it did a great job on defaulting the RAID.
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Having never left the RedHat fold, (I'm typing this on a Fedora 21 Laptop) I can't say with any honesty that I've missed them. At all.
Red Hat has been very, very good to me! My business is based on RHEL/CentOS and since Red Hat is quite profitable, I have a simple, economic assurance that my technology base won't disappear.
Feel free to use Ubuntu/Mint/Whatever as your hip distro; but Red Hat has carried a solid, economically potent and robust distro for decades.
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How sad (Score:2)
Re: How sad (Score:2)
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Dumb question time...
Does anyone recall the distro that had a game you could play during installation of the OS? You were a penguin who slid on their belly down through the snow and had to avoid objects and go through the gates like a slalom skier... My brain has seemingly fried that synapses. I can not recall which distro it was... It was not Mandrake which would have been the name at the time as this predates the Mandriva renaming/rebranding.
Opera spell-check wanted to change Mandriva to Mandrake. I am am
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That is very likely the name of the game. I am not an avid gamer so I played it simply due to the novelty of being able to play a game while the OS installed in the background. It may have been the installable Knoppix? It was not RedHat nor Suse. Mint was not out then. Ubuntu was not out then. Hmm...
Thank you - any other hints? My Google-fu has failed me. I suck and should feel bad.
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Thank you but I am not seeking the game. I am just trying to remember the distro.
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Cool, I may look there (though I do not recall ever using that distro) to see where they come from and whatnot. I may then find the distro I am thinking of. Thanks. Anyone else?
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Was that Tetris or the Tux game though?
Re: How sad (Score:1)
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Good Lord... Kids.. 16 for me would be 1966...
Obligatory Hey_You_Kids_Get_Off_My_Lawn....
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OK, for your benefit.
My first experience with Linux was Slackware in 1993, when I was 19. I had to ask a mate to download 25 or so 3.5" disks for me because he had access to internet at the university, and the rest of the world did not. Since the disks where shitty and/or demagnetized by the train ride, it took a couple of weeks to get all 25 disks in a readable state. Fun autumn :-)
I never even looked at Mandrake/Mandriva. I think I switched to Debian in 95 or so, when it got dpkg which was just re
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Shouldn't someone from the anti-open-source bunch be on here stating that this "proves" that open source isn't viable?
Oops, shouldn't give them ideas.
I more lament the demise of Crunchbang, actually. It was a pretty original concept. But distros come and go. There are market forces in open source, too. Commercial software also comes and goes, but when it goes, users are generally left with ... not much.
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Shouldn't someone from the anti-open-source bunch be on here stating that this "proves" that open source isn't viable?
Oops, shouldn't give them ideas.
I more lament the demise of Crunchbang, actually. It was a pretty original concept. But distros come and go. There are market forces in open source, too. Commercial software also comes and goes, but when it goes, users are generally left with ... not much.
You might be interested in Crunchbang++ [crunchbangplusplus.org]. They are basically a continuation of the original, with the same goals and values. I've been mainly a FreeBSD user since early 2005 or so, and that's my main OS for my workstation. However, when it came to my laptop, nothing could beat Crunchbang on that thing - hope the successor can be as awesome as the original.
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Technically my first was RedHat and I could not get that fucker to install properly on any machine. Every. Single. One... The monitor would never work - multiple different monitors. It worked during the install process, damn it... I paid for that disk too! Mandrake is the first one that, well, just worked. I had used Sun before it but that was UNIX.
This goes in the category of (Score:1)
I didn't even realize they were still around.
Way back when... (Score:2)
In 1999, Mandrake was the first distro I ever got installed and running 100%. I've long since abandoned it, but it's a happy memory.
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In 1999, Mandrake was the first distro I ever got installed and running 100%. I've long since abandoned it, but it's a happy memory.
Same here. (Well, x86 linux because I had MkLinux running on a Mac, but that was almost idiot proof.) Getting the sound card going was quite a bitch, iirc. Not quite the "having to fiddle with interrupts and memory ranges" days, but it was close.
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I ended up pulling my SB Pro out to read the jumpers so I could run the config tool properly. The 33.6k modem was the real challenge. And that was after I upgraded from my US Robotics WinModem.
It's amazing how easy we have it these days.
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Mageia (Score:5, Informative)
I made the move to Mageia years ago and never looked back. Still happy. Since it is not a business, it should theoretically not go under. Retains all the spirit and functionality of Mandrake/Mandriva but is completely community driven. It is a great desktop distro.
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I also have had an extremely positive experience with Mageia. It's a stable, very finished distro. Been using it for 4 years and no complaints.
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They do have the most available packages, and the best hardware support, IMHO.
Will be missed (Score:2)
Back around 2000 or so, Mandrake was THE distro for newbies. It was a straighforward simple install, and it Just Worked(tm). My first distro that I was able to really get working was Mandrake 8.1
The funny thing about Mandrake distributions was they had their own "only use version 3 of MS whatever" rule. Basically, it was "Use the x.1 version. x.0 and x.2 suck."
They started going downhill with the Mandriva name, and when they ran into financial trouble, I - like many others - switched to Mageia.
Still a d
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They ran into financial trouble as Mandrake. The distribution was moderately profitable but they lost their shirt on an educational software venture that failed.
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At risk of being pedantic, I believe it was Mandrake in 2000 or so. I think 8.1 was still Mandrake at least, but my memory could be fuzzy so I won't bet on it nor state it authoritatively. I am also too damned lazy to look it up. Google is so far away...
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They became Mandriva somewhere after the Mandrake 10.2 release. I think it was around 2005 or so. They started naming the releases by year around that point.
And yes, in 2001 it was Mandrake 8.1.
It's not over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is over.
The distro is the same, present in the daughters OpenMandriva, in Mageia and in ROSA/POCA. The distro is not over, though the forks are just starting to diverge.
The developers are still there, the users are still there -- and above all, Linux is still there. It's not even like when XP reached its EOL. One just has to pick a distro and go on.
The developers are great people. If you try so hard to make it happen, that can only mean you have a strong heart and courage to face the odds. What they lack was Marketing skills. Other Linux distros, if they're smart, are probably contacting these guys because Mandriva had an excellence which I witnessed several times these last years. Or hardware makers, if they need e.g. embedded Linux for, say, a phone... *wink*.
Because the Mandriva guys were thoughtful, the user community has already another place to go, OpenMandriva. BTW, thank you, fellas, you did think about us even in your darkest hour. Not so many are that nice in this world we live now. More than once you saved me. Thanks for being awesome!
Some even opted for Mageia long ago (like me). And ROSA looks another good option. For those who want traditional desktops, there's also other similar distributions, though for hardware support and configuration probably just a few can rival Mandriva.
Actually, there was some wise juggling behind the stages and we now face the demise of just the part of the company which was supposed to offer enterprise services and products. With players like Red Hat, SuSE and Oracle, I think this is a somewhat hard to enter fight. Any other competitor would face difficult odds in that arena.
It's not the end, too, because I bet these people will still offer professional services, either personally or they might join others coming from Mandriva, or from one of the daughters, or still being hired but already existing service providers.
I was much more worried the first time they sank :-) I hope they get reunited in the future, after they perfect their ninja skills to fight again and I hope next time they pay more attention to Marketing -- if nothing more to devise a minimally acceptable name -- even Mageia and OpenMandriva names suck majorly and ROSA, well, ROSA is OK but the logo is blue when it should be rosy! Ever imagined Red Hat's logo in green?
At last, it's not the end, because... it ain't over till the fat lady sings! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_ain%27t_over_till_the_fat_lady_sings
Rock Solid (Score:2)
Brings back memories (Score:2)
I remember popping the disk out to make sure I didn't put a Redhat disk in by mistake when I saw "REDHAT LINUX" across the top of the installer. No, it really was the Mandrake disk.
No surprise (Score:2)
It was a sinking ship before I ever started using Linux -- Mandriva 2009 was my first ever distro, and it made me fall in love with Linux. But the writing was on the wall for that company, well documented in the forums I used to frequent back in the day. These days (and since roughly 2010) I'm an Arch Linux user, so I never got on the wagon to Mageia, but back then I so desperately was ready to take on a huge role with the community-based distro that we always talked about.
Corel Photopaint & Mandrake 9 (Score:1)
Once upon a time, it was possible to install Corel Photopaint on Mandrake 9.x and it was fantastic.
Only Apple Macs ruled the designer world roost and this was a rebellion in its on right.
I was there ... (Score:2)
A couple of years after that I reported a bug with the installer of the then-new version (8.0). When they wrote me back they asked if I needed help with the bug, I
fairwell (Score:2)
But, but... Year of the Linux Desktop! (Score:2)
Wait, I thought that any time now we'd have the "Year of the Linux Desktop!" It has only been promised to us for 20 years now.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/2... [zdnet.com]
That was from 2004.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
That is from 2005, but has some interesting observations from years past
http://linux.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
That one is from 2007, it asks "Is 2008 the Year of the Linux Desktop?"
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NO IT IS NOT AND IT NEVER WILL BE. Yea, yea, a few techies use it and will probably always use it. It will run millions
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If Microsoft has its way with Secure Boot, it will be 100 percent.
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You think so? My understanding is that Secure Boot can be turned off in the BIOS.
I also thought that you could get a "secure boot" version of Linux.
If I'm mistaken, please let me know.
Re:F/OSS reality (Score:5, Informative)
>"Strong? That's an understatement considering we're looking at +-1000 hits per day on average... compared to the 10s of thousand hits for Ubuntu"
Really? Because that is not what distrowatch shows. For last 6 months it has it listed as the 8th most watched distro and with 970 hits per day compared to Ubuntu's 1738 hits per day which is not even double.
In the last 12 months, Mageia is ranked 6th. And for the previous 12 months, Mageia was ranked 4th, with hits approaching Ubuntu. Mageia has longer release cycles, so when Mageia 5 hits, watch the current rank start to climb again.
Not that distrowatch is some type of scientific survey or anything, but it is something other than just wild rantings of an "anonymous coward".
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Comparing the hits of any Linux distro to iOS/OSX or Windows is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and makes little sense. Everyone knows that desktop Linux has a tiny marketshare. It might make some sense to compare to OSX perhaps, but certainly not Windows, and definitely not a mobile OS like iOS.
What you should be comparing is how popular it is in relation to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.
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Face it, if Windows were a politician he'd be re-elected with a 90% majority every time, because Windows can deliver on his promises while Linux can't.
It's only really Linux desktop that does poorly. Embedded, mobile and server are fantastic. Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you ne
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I don't think that say Ubuntu is particularly more of a headfuck than Windows 8... Windows try really hard to hide some pretty fundamental facts from the user,
just to look simpler to use, with the result that it's *harder* to use the system since a lot of behavior is just inexplicable without the underlying metaphors.
Like the file system in windows for instance. Where are my files? Is the file system root the desktop? Or My Documents, or C:/ or my network drive?
(The driver support on Linux is a bit crappier
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Linux driver support definitely is a bit crappier, but it's a lot better than it was even say 5 years ago. Linux's biggest problem on the desktop is the lack of application support, the basics are there and there are a lot of admin/dev/poweruser tools but for workstation users it's pretty slim pickings. Most of the mainstream vendors don't provide Linux support for their biggest offerings - which are more often than not the industry standard - and that is the real issue.
Even if you don't have UI consistency
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My experience is that it has gotten worse. 5 years ago I could pretty much run an arbitrary Linux distribution on an arbitrary 1 year old laptop and have say an 80% chance of few if any problems. Today most interesting laptops have whole swaths of features not covered and many drivers not included. I think hardware got more interesting and the Linux community has gotten less focused on desktop (und
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I dunno - Windows 8.xx doesn't support some of my working older devices all that well - which is understandable as manufacturers can't or won't opensource their code and/or do not want to rewrite drivers for products they are no longer selling. I am running both Windows 8.1 & Manjaro (Arch) Linux and am fairly satisfied with both. I agree that newer stuff always seems to be an issue in Linux at least initially but things usually sort themselves out over time - usually it seems to take longer when there
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(The driver support on Linux is a bit crappier though, since very few vendors spend time or money on linux drivers for their consumer-class stuff, especially l
The driver support is usually *better* on Linux because you aren't reliant on some stupid hardware vendor who doesn't feel like updating their driver for a new OS release. This happens on Windows all the time. Driver quality is usually better too; manufacturers are notorious for making shoddy and bloated driver packages with all kinds of extra crapw
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The driver support is usually *better* on Linux because you aren't reliant on some stupid hardware vendor who doesn't feel like updating their driver for a new OS release. This happens on Windows all the time.
They don't have to update the driver. Even Vista drivers work fine in Windows 10.
Driver quality is usually better too; manufacturers are notorious for making shoddy and bloated driver packages with all kinds of extra crapware included.
Most stuff coming from Windows Update does not have crapware. These days even OEMs often provide junk-free installation packages. What comes to the actual driver quality, it usually is better under Windows, as all features are implemented and optimized, and the power management works properly.
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IBM T40. No Sound or WiFi on Windows 7. Both work fine on Scientific & Kali.
Asus Eee. Everything works on both, but the touchpad configuration utility (which was excellent on XP) doesn't work on 7.
Clevo D900T: Had problems getting sound on both Win 7 and CentOS driver didn't install by default. Can't get WiFi to work on either. Can't find a GeForce driver that will install on Win 7, so only get full resolution on Linux.
So for me Linux wins more often than it loses in the driver game.
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Windows has always been easier to use with multiple drives or partitions or CD/DVD drives. /media/username/f907c92b-cc37-4207-aab7-90a526d154f2 (I shit you not), semi-auto mounted.
You just go to D:\, E:\, F:\ etc. instead of doing a mkdir as root and editing the fstab, or living with poor defaults like
You can also go to Disk Management to assign drive letters, "deassign" them for partitions you don't want to see mounted and as far as the user is concerned : there's one file system root per file system.
Why
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When a manufacturer is selecting which OS to pre-install the only thing that matters is which one will allow the average user to run the most applications. Believe it or not people use computers to run applications not just an OS. This applies to both personal and business users. If the FOSS OS evangelists spent more time pushing for more applications and development tools that help streamline application development then Linux in all it's variations might actually be used more outside the data center.
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You are wrong. OEMs charge money to preinstall software (trial-ware, most of it). They can do that on Windows, but not on Linux. Thus, it actually ends up costing more (in terms of opportunity costs) to install Linux over Windows.
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OEMs charge money to preinstall software (trial-ware, most of it). They can do that on Windows, but not on Linux.
You can't preinstall software on Linux? Why not? What would stop them from preinstalling the trial of McAfee or avast! or AVG linux trial products?
Re:F/OSS reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them. I never have to do anything much with that computer, besides regular backups of course. Back when she was running Windows, I had no end of problems with it. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to similar stories, of switching their spouses or parents to Linux and no longer needing to spend any time being their unpaid tech support.
What desktop Linux is, is a very good product for people who don't need to run any Windows (or OSX) applications. For home users who just surf the web, use Facebook, and do basic PC tasks like some basic word processing or whatever, Linux works extremely well. For people who just *have* to run Photoshop or whatever, obviously that's a problem, but not everyone is like that.
The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you need?! ALSA, PulseAudio, FFADO, Jack, OSS, etc...) and all kinds of different UI paradigms, frameworks and toolkits.
You're completely overblowing things. Most modern Linux distros have settled on ALSA and PulseAudio (ALSA is the kernel-level drivers; PulseAudio is a userspace layer on top of that) and it works fine. No one uses OSS on Linux any more, and Jack is only used by a small number of people doing high-performance audio stuff. Different UIs aren't a big problem; people get along just fine choosing a desktop environment like KDE or Cinnamon and sticking with that. Different toolkits don't matter if you aren't developing software; you can run software written in one just fine in a DE written in another.
The problem with that is that the vast majority of computer uses do not want to choose every different option for every different part of the operating system
And they don't need to. Just download a copy of Ubuntu or Mint and be done with it. That's what everyone else does. This choice is generally made by the person who's computer-savvy, and the user doesn't question it. My wife uses KDE because I chose that for her since I prefer it and it works similarly to Windows, and she's never had a problem with it. She doesn't know or ask about Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, Xcfe, etc. People have zillions of choices when they buy a car too, but regular, everyday people don't have a problem there. They pick something they like and stop worrying about it. It may be a car their friend had, or they may have just stopped at a dealership and checked out a few things based on a salesman's advice. No one checks out every single model of car before making a decision.
yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).
No, actually it doesn't (BTW, your sentence doesn't parse here). Most home users don't do anything terribly complicated with their computers, and these days they really don't do anything besides use it for web-surfing. This is why tablets have become so popular: people are sick of Windows problems, and tablets work just fine for using Facebook. Linux works fine here too, and better than tablets (since you get a real monitor, a real keyboard, real storage space, etc.). For the things most home users do, Linux does them extremely well. It can even play a lot of games now too, though that still works better on Windows because many games still don't support Linux (including anything that isn't on Steam) of course. No, it doesn't do TurboTax, but who cares: everyone's moving to web-based stuff for that. No, it doesn't run Pro/E, but how many home users do that. I've never heard of someone's grandma running engineering software. No, it doesn't run [random Windows software], but neither does Mac OSX, but I never hear of anyone saying Macbooks aren't viable alternatives.
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If all you say is true then what is your reasoning for why Linux adoption is still in the low-single-digit percentage?
A combination of: it's long-standing reputation for user-hostility, a general lack of interest in "geeky" things, fear of the unknown, and the fact that you have to go wayout of your way to get a copy.
True story:Iwas talking with a friend, who is a school-teacher, at a bar, and she mentioned how sad she was that the school was shutting down their Ubuntu lab. A while later, Isaid something about Linux, and she said, "Oh Ihate that." So Isaid, "if you hate it, why are you so sad the school is shutting down th
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One one side we have all the schemes that Gates & Zuckerberg dream up to make every kid a computer genius.
On the other we have teachers who are as dumb as box of rocks.
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If all you say is true then what is your reasoning for why Linux adoption is still in the low-single-digit percentage?
Because if what he says is true then the operating system doesn't matter at all. So long as you can turn on your computer and hit the button for the web browser you'd be set, you can do that on Windows and OSX already on your desktop so there's still no reason to switch to Linux and that's why its marketshare remains low.
If users only care about the web browser then what's the point of any of these Linux distros?
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The reasons why GP is far from an excellent reply:
1. Anecdotes are not data. Doubly so if its someone who lives with you.
2. Native apps still matter because they attract a wide-ranging ecosystem of talented people who move between native apps and the Web, and...
3. ...That range of people between grandma and kernel developers form networks of support and advocacy. If the Power Users don't like your pile of bytes called an OS, the more creative ones won't start writing interesting apps for their non-techie friends and colleagues, and they won't recommend the OS either.
4. People depend on the 'look and feel' of software environments. Its what enables tech support staff to deliver *usable* instructions in a way that doesn't feel threatening to users, and also to get reliable answers from those same users. Having a well-defined GUI is important, but Linux is very slippery in this area.
There are many more reasons why GP represents nerdy myopia and wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important one is that Apple and Microsoft laid down, by example, a de-facto definition of what Desktop Personal Computer is. The FOSS community actively sabotages itself whenever it tentatively tries to reverse engineer the *concept* of the desktop PC; I think most of those numbskulls would define it as some kind of aberration that needs to be stomped out. Where "platform" is supposed to evoke (feature) stability and recognizable surroundings, the Desktop Linux crowd instead create this. [youtube.com]
Perhaps I should start using stronger words than "numbskull" for these true believers.
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Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them.
The obligatory Slashdot-Linux-enthusiast defense of "Desktop Linux for my relative" never ceases to make me chuckle. [slashdot.org] I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
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I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
Did you ever consider that people advance this idea because it's true? There's plenty of people that JUST want email and the web. They don't care about native apps and never will. They use their computers to communicate with other people, and couldn't care one whit about doing their taxes on their computer, or editing video.
Its demonstrably UNtrue, otherwise Apple and Microsoft would not still be viable companies. "Plenty of people" apparently does not define the whole consumer electronics market.
That you think Chrome OS belongs in the Desktop Linux category is instructive... But Google doesn't even identify Chrome OS as Linux. They could switch to a different, closed kernel and hardly anyone using Chromebooks would notice or care. That's because a Chromebook is a type of mainframe terminal or client, not a personal computer (
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The real problem with Linux on the desktop, in my experience, is the first time a new user goes looking for software somewhere other than the distro repository.
Back in my foolish days of trying to change the world, one family asked me to fix their incredibly ancient old Windows 95 machine that was infected up the gazoo with malware, and had failing components too. I ended up giving them a much newer Pentium III machine totally free, with a highly customized Linux install I tailored to their tastes and need
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The only thing that windows does better there in windows 8 is video drivers... where gamers have gotten used to hard locks until they've tried three different versions of the driver.
Windows doesn't do drivers, the hardware manufacturer writes the drivers. If the driver is crashing that is the responsibility of the vendor.
Oh, but that one OpenSSL bug that was there for so long
What does that have to do with anything? OpenSSL runs on Windows too, heartbleed could be exploited on the Windows platform as well.
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That's actually incorrect. Windows ran a customized openssl that is not vulnerable. http://blogs.microsoft.com/cyb... [microsoft.com]
That's talking about the Windows' builtin services don't run OpenSSL at all, they use their own SSL/TLS implementation, the article you linked even says that. However you can run OpenSSL on Windows and if you ran a version that had the heartbleed vulnerability it is just as exploitable on Windows as on Linux.
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The only thing that windows does better there in windows 8 is video drivers..
I beg to differ on that.. I have a Dell Precision M4400 that I generally run Linux on. The laptop has Nvidia Quadro FX580M 512mb discrete video. I've *never* had a
hiccup on Linux, using the Nvidia "blob" driver. I did some work for a friend on his Windows install, and rather than pay me, he gave me a spare shrink-wrapped
retail copy of Windows 8.1. Just for shits/grins, I took a spare drive, popped it in the laptop instead of the Linux disk, and installed 8.1.. Figured since I'm the defacto neighborhood "tec
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>"It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Linux is dying"
Let me guess, you are somehow related to Microsoft...
Your "facts" are very wrong by the way.... Linux is on many orders of magnitude more than 1% of servers.
Go away, anonymous coward...
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Holy shit... I thought you were dead or something.
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I hadn't noticed him in a long time. I figured dead or in a psyche hospital.
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I can adapt to it fine, except for when it ends up like this http://imgur.com/QQojrbG [imgur.com]
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Sad you folks consider it a troll. They really did do that, and left many of us really upset over it. Upset enough to stop buying their product and switch to other distributions.