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Phoronix: Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Gets A Summer Release
Following a period of uncertainty when it looked like Mandriva's parent company could disappear due to financial troubles, Mandriva is now on a better financial footing and as such they have released their long-awaited Mandriva Linux 2010.1 "Spring" release...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQwNA
Mandriva needs serious advertising.
It used to be the best desktop Linux out there and now almost nobody cares for it. Why? Because it is bad? Nope, but because we rarely hear it's name.
Never used it, but props on the video handling on their website. Downloadable ogv links right below the flash box :)
Yup, Mandriva is some most excellent distro and 2010 Spring is a very solid release. My sister has been runing it since RC1 without a problem. And I agree with Apopas, Mandriva could definitely use more promotion. Being used to Gentoo and Arch I sometimes juts miss some more uptodate packages, but I guess this stability in versions is good for normal users.
When you need to reconfigure something in Ubuntu, you got to spend ½ an hour searching for a graphical tool to preform task (ex. reconfig grub). In Mandriva you just fire up the Mandriva Linux Control Center, and *BANG* 1min later you are done reconfiguring grub.
I've used Mandriva since Mandrake 7.2 (that was a result of the miserable state of RedHat 7.1, ask your grandkids about that one)
The thing that really sells me on Mandriva is the huge software base behind it. The i586 and x86_64 distributions come on their own DVDs which ads up to about 1/4 of the whole software base. Then there's the Penguin Liberation Front (http://easyurpmi.zarb.org) resources which adds fully configured ffmpeg, mplayer and other codecs to Mandriva's huge software base.
Then there's DrakConf which is a really, really, nice configuration center. I looked at Fedora, Ubuntu and a few others and realized how much I'd miss Mandriva if they went away. I'd cope but Mandriva is really in my comfort-zone.
As for paying for it, I've paid since they had their club and always bough the powerpacks. I don't need the powerpacks but Mandriva deserves the money.
Nicely stated..Quote:
Originally Posted by gukin
MIB provides some good packages as well as some of the others in community like MVT.
I've been using Mandriva alongside Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse (all latest releases) for a couple of years, and it is certainly the equal of any. In some, minor respects it is even better than.
But therein lies the problem: if Mandriva is 'equal too, and only slightly better than', where is the need for it? It offers the same functionality, the same software packages, the same DE's, pretty much the same experience.
I like its aesthetic and philosophy, but we are really talking about a skin.
Now that it's on the ropes, it will be increasingly difficult to attract developers and users both.
Mandriva seems destined to fall by the wayside, unless it can come up with some major differentiator(s) between it and the others (and Mandriva is not the only one).
It has always been excellent easy-to-use distro and besides Ubuntu the only distro in that genre which isn't essentially a public beta for some major corporate release (see: Fedora, openSUSE). It has differentiation, Mandrake Control Center being one of its strongest points, and attention to stability compared to others, Ubuntu LTS aside.Quote:
Originally Posted by dsmithhfx
Everything wrong with it comes down to outdated business model and bad management.
But those aren't major differences. The fact that Fedora and OpenSuse may be (as you put it) "public beta" releases of their non-free enterprise products kind of misses the point. Mandriva is not really any better, or different in any quantifiable way.Quote:
Originally Posted by daedaluz
I enjoy using them all, but they are all powerful, polished products that do exactly the same thing.