Mandrake Linux commercial (1999) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
While Mageia is there, they seem to have hard time to innovate and keep the pace, but I am still glad they are here.
It wasn't the first time I'd used Linux -- that was Trustix over ssh -- but it was the first graphical distribution I'd tried. Earlier that summer, I'd (painstakingly over a 33 kbps connnection) downloaded Phatlinux, an early live CD distro. I couldn't run it on my Compaq for some reason, but I did get it to work on my aunt's computer. Phatlinux gave me a reason to investigate more and Mandrake let me do it. I think I used Mandrake on that machine until I discovered Red Hat in college (ca. 2003) and I switched to Ubuntu shortly after its first release in 2004.
See http://linuxbsdos.com/category/rosa-desktop; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/mageia; and http://linuxbsdos.com/category/openmandriva
Mandrake Linux was the third distro I used, after Red Hat and Linux PowerPC 2000. Btw, I still have my 2-set Mandrake Linux 8.1 CD.
... and PCLinuxOS:
No, PCLinuxOS used to be based on Mandrake/Mandriva, but not any more.
ROSA Linux and those I listed became "independent" because Mandriva went bust. PCLinuxOS forged it's own part while Mandriva was still active.
So thanks, Mandrake developers!
I forged ahead and have ran Linux systems off and on from then until now.
after watching this?
As for what happened to Mandrake, Mandrake became Mandriva after merging with Conectiva Linux, then after some money issues the core Mandriva developers created a fork of Mandriva called Mageia.
Mageia is still in active development, version 5 was released in June 2015:
From the point of aesthetics, I think Mandrake was quite advanced - I tried some other distros at that time but none felt as well put together as Mandrake.
One of the things that was getting annoying for me was that I kept seeing more and more packages I wanted available as .deb compared to .rpm. At first I just force installed or compiled but that messed up the system since I was walking all over the package manager. I backed-off from installing from source and just stayed with RPM and tried newer distros e.g. SuSE. Most articles on the web that time about installing Debian gave me the impression that I needed to be an "expert" (even after 3-4 years of daily Linux experience as an end-user). When Ubuntu came along, I gave the live CD a try and loved how good Gnome looked, how responsive it was, how it "just worked" most of the time and how 99% of the time apt-get would find me what I wanted. I briefly gave OpenSUSE a try after the Unity forced my hand to leave Ubuntu but YaST felt way too heavy handed. Been using Linux Mint for a while now and I think I'll settle with Mint as long as they dont do "weird stuff". If they do, my next and last distro would be pure Debian.
They always had problems financially. I don't think there was ever a good business-plan that worked. Sometimes Powerpacks, the MandrakeClub, and also donations. They were always on the brink of disaster. I think in the end the investors were tired and pulled the plug. They were quite big in France, in the military and governent departments. But apparently they don't pay as well as the US pays Red Hat.
I still don't know any distro that has an installer that is as good as Mandrake's. And definitely no Mandrake Control Center thingie. Up to this day there is no equivalent to that. They had that nailed. (I do pity the almost yearly rewrites of those as management demanded, and the bugs that came from it). They were also the first distro with a list of pci id's and vendor id's, so drivers would be configured and loaded automatically. We now take it for granted, but this was non-existant on other distro's, you always had to meddle with modprobe.conf.