Mandriva 2011 Out 156
shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came long before and had an easy to use (and powerful) desktop back when it was almost unheard of."
wrong argument (Score:1, Informative)
So if I understand correctly, the argument for getting mandriva boils down to: "Use it because it's older than Ubuntu"?
Re:When Mandriva was Mandrake... (Score:3, Informative)
I recall one release of Mandriva that had lots of support requests on the forums for not working sound.
The problem: by default the volume control was turned down completely! Just turning up the volume solved it. Silly.
Mandriva isn't trusted by the community (Score:3, Informative)
Mandriva isn't trusted by the community, that is why they forked it and named it Mageia, mainly to keep it from going under and to head for a new direction.
Re:wrong argument (Score:0, Informative)
"Use it because it's older"?
it works for the Catholic Church !
Re:Still alive?! (Score:5, Informative)
I've got no beef with the way Ubuntu, GNOME 3, KDE 4 work. If that's your cup of tea then still give Mandriva a try, you may in fact like it.
Real quick I want to address one thing...
Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often.
Mandriva will have an LTS option hopefully by the end of this year. Tour of 2011 [mandriva.com]
Politics in the Mandriva world have played out to start emulating the Ubuntu release cycle sans the two a year release. Instead we will see a normal Mandriva release once a year with regular patches for 1.5 years after release. Starting at the end of this year will be the LTS line. No word on how often a LTS will come out but 2011 LTS will receive patches for 3 years.
Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?
I would dare say that one of the big things that has held Mandriva back is KDE. Mandriva 2011 supports KDE only, no GNOME mess here. KDE's polish over the several iterations since the 4.0 disaster really shows here in Mandriva. Many things are being addressed and there are plans to make normal GTK+ applications more KDE friendly (like how SuSE has made their firefox integrate into KDE nicely.) The biggest thing I think is that Mandriva understands that a lot of people are getting annoyed with the sudden changes in favorite applications and desktops.
The standard kicker is replaced with a Mandriva specific kicker that I think is a good compromise between modern and classical application menus. Amarok is not present in this release, instead is Clementine, which is loosely based on the Amarok of 1.4 days. KMail (and everything it brings) is not present either, instead is Thunderbird from Mozilla. LibreOffice 3.4 is used, which I think is the best version out there thus far and the most useful for day to day operations. (side note:) A few Windows users at our company were switched off of Office 2007 to LibreOffice 3.4.2 and have had really great results in their day to day operations; so much so, we may be moving them off Windows altogether. The users only need TN5250 emulation, Microsoft Exchange support, modern web support, and an Office suite that can connect to DB2 and do Pivot Tables.
Finally, the package manager is what I would call sane for most Linux heads. Yeah it's not dumbed down like the Ubuntu store but I think most people will enjoy what they see here. Overall Mandriva 2011 offers a desktop that I think will rival Ubuntu. With all the compromises that they have made with KDE between new hotness and what we all enjoyed from the Linux desktop pre-Mac OS X copier era, I think this distro will start to fill a ever-growing niche of old school Linux users that enjoyed DE as they were.
Re:Mandriva isn't trusted by the community (Score:5, Informative)
Horse shit. I use Mandriva on a number of critical systems, and I know many others who do the same.
[...]
I've already downloaded the new Mandriva, will put it on my test system later tonight, and will most likely upgrade a dozen or more servers over the week.
Long-time Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia contributor here ... I would warn you that in the past, a lot of server-related packages were maintained by the community (apache and php being about the only ones maintained by one over-worked employee). For a number of reasons, a lot of those contributors have become disenfranchised with Mandriva, and have been porting their work over to Mageia. Thus far, my packages are still in sync between the two, but recent events have been motivating me to rather consolidate my work on Mageia:
These issues seem to not be affecting Mageia much, so now that 2011 is out, and I will be forced to decide between Mandriva and Mageia for my own uses, I will probably be upgrading all my Mandriva 2010.1 machines to Magiea, and will probably move all my effort to Mageia and orphan my Mandriva packages (like many other contributors have done). The current focus of Mandriva is not sufficient for my own uses, so I believe my contributions will be of more value to myself in Mageia than Mandriva.
Note to all users considering Mandriva 2011, note that while an upgrade to Mandriva 2011 should be relatively painless, a later crossgrade to Mageia will not be (due to the RPM5 switch in Mandriva 2011), while a cross-grade from Mandriva 2010.1 to Mageia should also be as painless as upgrading to Mandriva 2011. So, while I won't tell you to ditch Mandriva, you should pause at this stage to decide if you are currently on Mandriva 2010.x.
Re:Still alive?! (Score:3, Informative)
You can always try Mageia. There are several people working on both the GNOME and KDE side of things and you should be in very familiar territory if you have previously become accustomed to Mandriva.
Re:Still alive?! (Score:4, Informative)
It certainly can't be that many if they need to drop anything but KPW as available and supported desktops...
I wouldn't call dropping everything but KDE as proof that they have very few contributors left. SuSE includes GNOME but officially supports KDE, Slackware dropped GNOME long time ago and doesn't include them at all. GNOME 2 was tricky to build and maintain. GNOME 3 is in, "I don't even know" land. GNOME with all of its dependencies, vast array of configuration options for each dependency, and magic order of build instructions for each dependency; does not tend to be easy to maintain a workable tree from source. A couple of people have built build systems that do nothing but build [gnome.org] GNOME. [gnome.org] Thankfully, most builders have given up on their own build systems and have gone to JHbuild.
KDE on the other hand is a pretty straight forward process to maintain a working tree. You can check it out here. [kde.org] Of course, that's something that the average user isn't going to do but there again we are talking about Mandriva. They have to maintain a working tree of the DE and still include their things. GNOME/KDE aren't targeting a single distro, they are making a DE for whoever. Distro have to take that and add and remove what works for their distro. To do this with GNOME is almost like putting stitches in yourself. KDE is very easy to customize distro-wise.
Red Hat and SUSE are successful because they have stuck to a single and coherent vision for their brand of Linux, because they have a good sales model that pushes support for their brand of Linux, because they have played major roles within the Linux community in general which attracts community contributors to use and support your distro, and because they have had strong word of mouth within the community.
Mandrake had that as well, but as you can tell from some of the comments here on Slashdot, that all changed with when they purchased Conectiva. I don't know if they got inflated head syndrome or what, but the quality of software and the number of upstream contributions began to cool quite a bit. Bug reports were not being followed up by Mandriva engineers and the community wasn't taking up the slack either, so bug reports would go on for months and months with no answer. Hardware support issues abounded as not incredibly smart defaults were chosen, the most famous (infamous) example is the decision to ship the distro with the main volume on mute.
The distro has had its hard core followers and commercial users who have stuck around, but as I noted in my last post, the politics behind the distro have played out into two things: Focusing on KDE alone and better release schedule. Those two things will make it easier for the community and Mandriva to support the distribution.
Finally, you have to remember that we are talking LTS for their free product. If you are a company you can purchase their "enterprise" Linux which has a different support cycle than the community version. Also, Mandriva has forty-five engineers to date, most of them are in Brazil (which by the way is very KDE heavy country.)
Here's why (Score:4, Informative)
They have good updates, excellent repositories, and a system that is both fairly cutting edge and quite stable. In other words it works and works well. Rarely do you ever need to go hunting beyond the official repos except to get unfree stuff that is ALL well supported in the PLF repos (which have a nice simple web interface that will set them up in URPMI with a couple of clicks). I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around, install stuff from various 3rd party repos, deal with dependency hell, etc. Haven't had to deal with any of that with Mandriva in quite a while now.
OTOH there are some downsides. URPMI isn't quite as slick as some of the APT based package managers, and French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess. Still, there's plenty of expertise on the net to solve any issues, the documentation exists, it is just badly organized.
Mandriva the company seems to have lost some of its steam in the last few years, but they are still pumping out an excellent distro. After using it as my primary desktop OS, internal server OS, and on numerous laptops for 10 years I really have no major complaints and see no compelling reason to switch. SUSE is the only other distro that supports KDE even half as well, and I'm just not that interested in switching to Gnome. Mandriva does what a distro should do, does it well, and will serve most people's needs quite well. I wouldn't run it on production servers only because it is a pain in the arse to leave off the desktop packages entirely for some reason, though it will WORK fine.