Mandriva Linux Turned Over To The Community | Hacker News Reader

Mandriva Linux Turned Over To The Community

phoronix.com

23 pointsXyzodiac8 comments

I remember using Mandriva (or Mandrake as it was known then) back in the day.

It was always the most attractive Linux, and in some ways the easiest to use. But god was it slow, it used to ship cutting edge KDE and run a ton of services by default, and I always used to find fixing problems much easier with debian or other distros.

direct link to mandriva blog post -- http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-r...

Any HN Mandriva users out there? Why does Mandriva matter now? I am using Ubuntu, Debian Centos on Servers and enjoyed pretty much every other distro, do you have any points why Mandriva matters in 2012 or what different it offers?

I did... ten years ago. They used to be the most user-friendly Linux distro available. I actually bought some of their box sets for my less-technical friends. In my opinion, Debian-based distros have won. For any of those old enough to recall the rpm versus deb debates/wars over which is better, it's rather clear that aptitude and Debian have taken the lead in the community. How many distros are derived from Debian now?

When Redhat killed RHL and focused on Enterprise Linux, that was the turning point. Now most of the big name Enterprise Linux guys are rpm based (RedHat, SuSE and Oracle) and the community distros are mostly Debian based.

Sad to see Mandrake go away though. Ten years ago, it was what Ubuntu is today.

Mandrake (7.2) was my first love. I was in my early teens, and had just gotten the I Love You virus, and so I went to K-Mart to find this Linux thing I had read online to fix it. Who knew, K-Mart actually had a little corner room full of software, and there was a Linux which could run on my 90Mhz, 160MB, 2.1GB computer.

I'm glad to see it is open to the community, although I can't help but wonder what this will do to Mageia.

I have fond memories of Mandrake, because that's the distribution that made me discover linux. But Ubuntu ate their lunch a long time ago. Not sure what went wrong for them, except that Ubuntu has much more traction.

The question now is what will be the response of the leaders of the community fork Mageia? http://www.mageia.org/en/

I always liked Mandrake's user friendliness and Live CD, but I feel like Ubuntu is pretty much the standard these days. It is tough to compete with that.

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