Remembering Mandriva
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I remember when Mandriva (then Mandrake), was THE newbie friendly distro to try merely a few years ago here in the States. Today, most new Linux users have no idea what Mandriva even is thanks to other friendly distros such as Ubuntu.
But it should be noted that we live in a wide world. And Mandriva is actually very popular overseas in places like France, Brazil and in Central America. North America has seemed to largely fall into the Ubuntu or OpenSuSE camps, along with some Fedora among others.
So even as they are ready to release Mandriva 2010, because their US marketing is so… invisible compared to other distros, no here really cares. And that is sad. It’s still a great distro and worth checking out. It is also the base of PCLinuxOS from what I have been told, which should, if nothing else, add to the curiosity.
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2 Comments
Len Cleavelin
October 20th, 2009
at 8:30am
I started with Mandrake Linux (before it even became Mandriva), and loved it (in fact, I forget exactly why I migrated to openSUSE, which I like very much too–it just seemed like a good idea at the time). If for some reason I decide to “retreat” from OpenSUSE I’ll probably go back to Mandriva instead of fooling around with Ubuntu (really, Kbuntu, because I’m a die-hard KDE fan).
Anshul
October 21st, 2009
at 4:16am
Mandriva was a distro that was left deep buried to die in 2005-2006, largely due to shooting itself in the foot….and also due to the rise of Ubuntu, opening up of SuSE and the rise of Fedora. However, they never did die, and rebounded back very strongly with their outstanding 2008.1 release, which is spoken of very very highly in Mandriva forums.
With their solid KDE4 release, starting from 2009.1 and 2010.0, they’re back in the reckoning. They seem to be getting their house in order by reaching out their community. Although, there is scope for improvement out there.
They offer the best Linux desktop experience, bar none. Ubuntu is too “sudo-this-sudo -that”, i.e. CLI based and lacks any admin tools, Fedora is too bleeding edge. Only Opensuse’s YaST can come close, but is not as good as being intuitive with their tools. Mandriva Control Center (MCC), Mandriva’s huge main & contrib repos+ PLF+ MIB provides a vast pool of software, great KDE4 implementation and a highly focused community give it an edge over the other biggies in the room.