Submitted by “Mandriva 2007 may be the best distribution I have used. Looking through Mandriva’s forum, you see employees of the company who care and are genuinely trying to help. Mandriva offers ‘Free as in freedom’ versions and versions with propriatery software. You would expect a release like this to be trumpeted. Instead, the release was met with hostility. Forums on tech sites were filled with Linux users cheering for the end of Mandriva. What happened? How did a company that was loved at one time become so unpopular? Is the hostility justified?”
The link in the article points to linuxforums.org and an ubuntu review. Did you mix things up a little bit?
It’s a Freudian slip. I’ve been keeping track of the discussions on the Mandriva Club forum, and it seems to me that the majority of the “this distro sucks” trolls make it very widely known which distro they are switching to… and it seems to be Ubuntu, with sprinkles of SUSE and Fedora Core.
I think that now more than ever, new Linux users are demanding free-as-in-price software without caring one bit about free-as-in-rights licenses. They don’t want to pay for a distro, even if it means less configuration work, commercial support, and better proprietary software compatibility.
When Mandriva was “popular” it lost money. Now it makes money but it’s somehow generally believed that it is “unpopular.” Seems strange, doesn’t it?
I’ve already mentioned that I used to enjoy Mandrake very much. I have since moved on to other distros, but not implicitly for cost reasons. I moved away from Mandrake because of bugs.
I like to try the various “popular” distros when I get a chance because they tend to have newer software with newer features that I like on my desktop. Unfortunately, newer software tends to have bugs, and Mandrake wasn’t doing as good of a job at squashing them as others when I left them.
The author of the article made a few good points at the end about what Mandriva could do now to ameliorate the “situation.” If they allow people to try their services for free for a certain time period, it allows people to make an educated decision about whether to pay to continue using those services. I for one am not about to pay for a particular version of Linux without knowing that it is worth the money when I already know that I can get similar services for free or am more familiar and confident with other pay-for Linux offerings.
People are much more willing to pay for things if they have confidence in them. I lost confidence in Mandrake, and I haven’t had the motivation to check out Mandriva until recently. We’ll have to see if it offers anything worth paying for that isn’t already freely available.
“When Mandriva was “popular” it lost money.”
http://www.mandriva.com/en/company/investors/financials
No , when Mandriva was popular , its Management specifically Le Marois and Poole , OVER SPENT and diverted fund from income making account ( Individuals ) to other account and paycheck of MANAGERS , they even tried to change the Distribtion into an E-learning company , Buying one E-learning company for Millions in the process.
” Now it makes money ”
It always made money , but the Management watch closely its spending this days , even do last year it bought too much for too high a price and ended up in the red again.
“somehow generally believed that it is “unpopular.” ”
Your going to claim that Mandriva as been pushing , marketed ( not publicity , real marketing ) and advertised properly there last release …
Mandriva suffer the Curse of the Bambino.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Bambino
It was great and had so much potential but when thing where supposed to go good the Management sold out and whent cheap.
What it need now is a Real Management who is in it for the win and invest in its core business.
You can give me all the Club bulshit you whant if you where interested in the Mandriva Club real details and real history you would see it as a miracle that saved Mandrake-linux , this done by very few people , people believe that Mandriva is fully behind it ( The Club ) when its far from reality , they collect money from it and divert the money to other thing ( Professionnal offers and paying other incurred debts. )
The first thing Adam Williamson should do is ask is club Member why they pay for the CLUB and what need improving.
That give you a list of why people might whant to join and pay for the club. Its a really false notion that its too pricey or cost more the Linspire.
Now that being said I would stamp a big huge button that say Make me an offer for CLUB membership , with a tell me why you should be given say Silver level for 30$ when you live in columbia and that your currency aint worth much.
When Linspire start offering a GNOME supported version and servers then will talk abouth them being on the same level …
But the best question left is Why would Adam Williamson need to buy a computer on Ebay when he is the Club Monkey leader ? is JOB is to get ASUS , ACER , LENOVO , GATEWAY , DELL , HP , ETC … to make him Special fully integrated with the mandriva distribution , MANDRIVA CLUB Branded offers … Wait forget that , its what a real club would do , NOT the mandriva club one …
http://store.mandriva.com/
WOW ! no really , WOW ! can someone please explain to me HOW exactly someone is going to know whats the difference between all the 2007 and 2006 offer beside the price WITHOUT a comparative charts …
I am going to take my Shut the f–k up about Mandriva lost cause , with the fluffy bunny OSAlert pills …
I bought my laptop off eBay because it was $100 cheaper than buying it direct from Lenovo =). It would be nice if they’d do Linux preinstalls, though. But this is something we’ve been working on. Mostly in France for the moment, but it’s coming along. See:
http://www.boostore.com/carrefour/Catalog/micro-informatique/ordina…
That section is pretty visible on the boostore.com website – it’s actually listed right in the panel on the left hand side, not hidden away at all. You can get a range of pretty nice HP laptops preloaded with MDV. That’s not too shabby.
We already did ask Club members why they joined the Club and what they’d like to see in future; we sent out an email survey a while back, we had a topic in the Club forums about it more recently, and we had Club members vote on a list of ten proposed Club services too. We are working very hard on improving the Club offering at the moment, though you don’t see a lot of the work as it’s not in a state where we can make it public yet.
Oh, I guess I should mention for those not familiar with French culture – boostore.com is the online store of Carrefour, which is basically the Wal-Mart of France.
Adam, we do have Carrefour in here ( Argentina .. they've been operational since 1982 or something like that) and in Brazil ( Carrefour is actually quite big all over latin America ). Do you by any chance now if they'll be offering pre-installed Mandriva around here?
It’s fixed.
http://www.linuxtechdaily.com/2006/11/editorial-thoughts-on-mandriv…
Please no mod up.
Ive had mandriva mess up my partitions more than any other distro… Love and hate relationship with it.
You might want to give memtest86+ a spin. Just a thought.
I felt very much the same as the author of the article.
I haven’t tried Mandriva 2007 yet, but I have been considering it. There was a time when Mandrake (I haven’t tried the distro since before they changed the name) was the only distro that really seemed to work well for me with little hassle. I was a newbie at the time, and even though I tried to do some homework, including recruiting some help from a Linux veteran, Mandrake allowed me to learn at my own pace. I considered joining the club, but I didn’t feel like I was ready to literally “buy in” to Linux. Then, they had a few stumbles. Unforgivable bugs cropped up in Mandrake, and I moved on to greener pastures. By the time their next release came along, it truly seemed like you couldn’t do much with Mandrake if you weren’t a club member. So, I decided to hold off on Mandrake for a while. I would like to at least test a distro before I lay down money for it.
Mandrake has since become Mandriva, and by all accounts they have just released a very nice new distro. It is at the top of my list of distros that I would like to try when I get a chance. I just hope that it doesn’t disappoint. Their competition has improved since I started using Linux.
I have tried a number of distros over the last 6 years and all I can say is that they’re all the same, if they use rpm, apt, portage, pacman, etc…They’re all Linux distros.
Nowadays, what influenciates most people is the image they have from a distro. People choose the distro they mostly identify to. People like Ubuntu these days because of the smart marketing work Ubuntu has done, saying they are committed to free software, with the philanthropical behavior, the shipit thing, the logo with the 3 people giving hand, etc… The linux community loves that. I have used Ubuntu, and I didn’t find it better than any other distro, from a technical point of view. It’s not better than Debian + Synaptic; it’s not better than SUSE + Yast or Fedora + YUMEX.
People love brandmarks, identities and they love to identify to a product. Study the average linux user, take a linux distro e rebrand it to fit to this linux user (hippy, communist, rebel, immature, gamer, traveller, anti-ms, anti-capitalist, anti-bush), and you have a successful product like Ubuntu.
Mandriva lost its #1 position because it hasn’t tailored to what the average Linux user wants. Any linux company behaving like MS will fail or at least will have a hard time because you don’t treat a linux user like a microsoft user. It’s not like “Pay $50 and you’ll have extra downloads”. No, Linux users want everything free. If you’re not entirely free, he goes see somewhere else, and there’s pretty much to choose from. So if you want to make money with Linux, you have to find other ways but you can’t limit the product.
I’ve tried the Mandriva One 2007 cd, and it was one of the worst looking Linux distros I’ve seen. The artwork, fonts, everything felt ugly and non-consistent. Not to mention it was very sluggish.
when i use mandrake the last time (2 years ago) i felt like i was not using linux and i was using mandrake…
was impossible to change desktop… to many scripts in the middle… to far away of linux simplicity, you cant do anything by hand you need a wizard for everything…
Is mandriva improved in this or is worse???? because i want to try mandriva…
By the way i like ubuntu for the console and apt
and i like slackware for simplicity
bye
Ubuntu for the console? is this a feature you’ve found to be missing from other distributions?!
Mandrake 7, from at least 6 years ago, gave you a choice of desktop environment from the login screen, I used to change WM like i change my socks, I guess they’ve complicated the process since.
Go and grab yourself a Mandriva liveCD, try it out, if you like what you see then install it, mandrake has had a stronger installation routine than virtually any other linux distribution for a very long time now, if i were to boot a mandrake 7.2 installation disc now it would still make better judgement calls on auto partitioning than Ubuntu can.
My own experience is with Mandriva Discovery 2007. It’s a great product (except for the occasional bug), but the process of dealing with the company to actually get the product was less than perfect.
The article author says that Mandriva looks like a “big, greedy” corporation. Mandriva behaves like the corporate heavy-weight it isn’t.
What’s peculiar is that with 130-odd employees, 50 of whom are NOT engineers (see http://www.mandriva.com/en/company), I’ve only ever seen two points of contact: the ever-helpful Adam Williamson, who isn’t even an official customer service representative (he’s the “club monkey”), and a customer service lady who shall remain anonymous because I could be very offensive about her if I wanted to be.
For a big company, that’s not much emphasis on dealing with the customer.
Then there’s the club: Mandriva Club is so overpriced! Linspire — which I realise doesn’t have many friends either — prices its CNR Gold service at US$50/year. This includes access to the OS and every package in CNR, plus discounts on commercial software. Mandriva Club, meanwhile, starts at US$66/year — the “recommended” Silver level is a whopping US$132/year (see http://www.mandriva.com/en/community/resources/club). In addition, one of the club benefits, Mandriva Online (the update service) is consistantly broken.
If Mandriva wants to compete with Linspire — after all, they share the same target audience — they need to fix elementary service delivery problems and reduce the entry cost of their preferred service, the club.
Edited 2006-11-02 00:44
With my Club hat on I basically am a CSR (plus a sprinkling of forum administration). I have my…unique…job title because I made it a condition of my accepting the job that I got to pick my own.
(technically speaking I do two entirely separate jobs for Mandriva. The proofreading / newsletter writing job I do is really a separate position from the Club support job.)
The distro is excellent and the company is not a monster.
`If` I could get promotional materials I would promote it around the university campus. I’m partial to black baseball caps.
I believe Mandriva should seriously consider revamping its price structure for university data centers and university students.
You are right, the club is overpriced for what it has to offer.
Consider that I want to pay to get Mandriva, I will buy the Mandriva Linux Discovery 2007 DVD at 44 EUR (40 $) and that’s all.
Note this is what I did a while ago when it was Mandriva 9.2 I think.
Of course you can get more if you pay more. But you won’t pay for the Club, even if you need more support. Who wants to be part of that Club really.
Over five years ago, Mandrake was the distro that got me started with Linux. But, as the author of this article wrote, I also went looking for greener pastures after 9.x came out. I wasn’t happy with it.
However, about six months ago I came back to Mandriva because of what I saw happening with 2006 and now have solidified my move back to the Mandriva OS with 2007. They really have done some wonderful work.
But not only am I using their distro again, I’ve also come back with money in my hand, buying a club membership for the first time. I really feel like they deserve the support.
I’ve also had encounters with a couple of the Mandriva support staff (above and beyond Adam). Although they are busy people – with the recent release of 2007 – they’ve always treated me with kindness and respect. In my eyes, they’ve demonstrated to me that they do care for their community members, although sometimes they can’t get to everyone right away. But, with a little patience and understanding, I’ve always gotten the help I needed from them.
I’m happy to be a paying club member and have been promoting Mandriva 2007 every chance I get.
I agree with almost everything in the article.
But I want to add that I don’t like the distro either, meaning that it is not right for me.
I have found annoying bugs both in 2006 and 2007, but in the 2007 release they seem to have become worse. Example: I can’t create and keep a working pppoe connection. With 2006 I could, I also wrote a tutorial in a help forum.
You can’t disactivate certain services, they will be reactivated after every reboot. And then there are the occasional random freezes.
SUSE has/used to have similar problems (I mean, your settings get overwritten by YaST), but 10.1 works fine for me (after the updates).
And then the look and feel: it is too “pretty”. I know it can be customized, but that is beyond the point.
If you, like me, love Debian, you’ll understand what I mean.
SUSE is also heavily customized, but they manage somehow to get better results, SUSE look and feel is more “professional”, IMHO.
Firing Gael Duval didn’t help at all, IMO. They should have done whatever it took to keep him.
Mandriva is still my personal favourite, I dont think all the hostility is justified. I wonder if Ubuntu will one day will also be on the receiving end ?
Linux is usually for free (gratis), and for some reason this leads many people to think that every popular application to be run on this platform must be free (gratis) too.
If a company like Mandriva then offers a paid Linux OS full of proprietary, paid-for, licensed software, there’s a lot of “you have to pay for it, that sucks” type of whining. An alternative reaction is, “Well, I’ll just go to Ubuntu and stalk the forums to get all the multimedia and 3D spinning cubes working.”
On a Dutch Linux forum, I literally saw the following request. “Could someone point me to a Linux distro that’s for free, looks cool, is easy to use for a Windows user, and has all the graphics drivers, mp3, DVD, win32 codecs etc. included, so I don’t have to go through all the hassle?”
In the paid field, therefore, your distro seems to be more than perfect to be considered value for money. In a way this is sad because it shows that people, in practice, are not willing to pay for Linux even a small percentage of the sum that is considered quite normal for other operating systems. Call it greedy if you like, especially if we’re dealing with people that don’t contribute any code, bug fixes, or bug reports, at all. Mandriva should not care about these people, that you can’t build a business on anyway. They’ll probably have a pirated Windows running too.
There’s not much to be done about that, except for making a distro that is more than perfect, stable, up-to-date, powerful, easy to use, fast, packed with great tools, eye candy, what not. People will be willing to pay for such a distro in the end, or for the services that the company that produces this distro provides. There’s no reason to suspect Mandriva can’t ever be such a distro, but it should never try to become such a distro just to please the whining greedy.
I couldn’t agree more. One problem with F/OSS is that there are *too many* people who want/need your money. I donate money, each month, to a F/OSS project, but my list of people I need to hit with cache is huge, and keeps growing. First and foremost, ther is always your distro of choice. Then there is your desktop/window manager of choice. Then there are your favorite applications. Then there are your favorite plugins. Then there are the people writing lower level stuff like ssh. Then there are… You get the idea. It’s kind of a bottomless pit. I’m finding myself spending way more money on F/OSS than I ever did for other software.
Maybe corporate usage should mean making a mandatory symbolic donation.
Mandriva should have stayed Mandrake.
Instead of spending millions on aquisition of other firms they could have better hired some talented developpers.
In addition they should fire the *ssholes who work for Mandriva and dare to question linux readiness for the desktop.
Hi netpython,
Mandriva is not allowed to use the name ‘Mandrake’ anymore, b/c “Mandrake the Magician” comics sued Mandrake Linux. The courts agreed with “Mandrake the Magician”, thus the need for a new name.
And the “millions on aquisition of other firm” were spent to hire Conectiva developer team, plus it’s sale force and support people, as Conectiva is *huge* in South America.
Sure, from non-South America countries Conectiva was not even in the radar (“Linux in Portuguese and Spanish? what for?”).
So, in the end, “Mandrake” invested those “millions” in talented developers.
And our last sentence… well, read the articles of those “*ssholes”, both articles: the ones hand-picked by blood-hungry press, and the follow-up articles where those “*ssholes” explain (again) why those comments.
You’l be surprised how little “*ssholes” those people really are.
But, again, a flamefest web snipped is more interesting than the whole article.
Peace!
Fair enough.
+1
back in my linux begins i used mandrake, and loved it. since i have matured i have switched to debian (pure) but i have always had a soft spot for the distro i learned on. sadly ive seen this distro through its tuffer times, the bankrupcy scare, and everything. and it has always bounced back, BUT i think with the firing of Gael, that was the last straw for me, i know look on with distain at a distro i once loved. so i’ll shed a tear for the original mandrake, we love you, we miss you. this thing you have become? well we dont know you anymore.
I gave this a shot out of boredom. One thing I always kinda liked about Mandrake was the control center. It was a nice central place to manage stuff, kinda like Yast on SuSE. I think it has a superior wireless network config tool, it will automatically ask for the drivers for my Broadcom wireless chipset (though it still doesn’t work but it’s notoriously difficult to get this specific one working). Beyond driver difficulties, the GUI for wireless is perfect, you tell it your SSID, what type of WEP is being used and then the wep key. Unlike Ubuntu where you have to include ‘restricted’ in the key field.
However, I seem to have some real problems with the theme manager, it core dumps every time I run it. The update tool is terrible compared to how other distros handle updates.
I have a friend at work who was a religious Gentoo user. He had tried 9.2 and 2006 and felt that they lacked what he needed. Well, I was chatting with him today at work, mainly bragging about getting KDE 3.5.5 to run on my Linux From Scratch system, and my jaw nearly dropped when he told me he has switched to 2007. He said that he had just upgraded his PC and put Mandriva One 2007 on the new drive “just until he gets Gentoo back up” but since it runs so nice, he said he has given up brewing Gentoo and instead he’s brewing beer.
As for me, I switched from cooker to stable 2007 for my main desktop when it was released and it makes me happy to have a no fuss desktop.
BUT many first time linux users I’ve spoken to lately are trying Ubuntu first and sticking with it. Something neat has happened with Ubuntu: It’s become a mainstream meme. People that have never used linux equate linux with Ubuntu. When you ask them why, they tell you it’s the easiest Linux you can use, so they plan on trying it.
Shuttleworth has made great inroads marketing Ubuntu with the perception of user friendliness. It makes no difference that Freespire, Fedora Core 5, Suse and Mandriva 2007 actually HAVE easier to learn tools. In the marketing game, perception is everything, and it is no coincidence that Ubuntu is fast eclipsing it’s big brother Debian.
As for me, well, I got KDE to build from source. I have futzing to do with my config files. cheers.
w/ mandrake/mandriva, originally to me it was simply the easiest to install distro i could find and things went “ok”… i didnt like how I couldn’t change much around w/o the above mentioned wizards everywhere..
then most recently i tried out Mandriva on my laptop someone claimed to have gotten my laptop’s pain in the ass sound working when no other distros could ‘out of the box’….. i like to call mandriva “schitzo linux” now, as a direct result of my experience with it.
The thing would just go nuts, random things would lock up, open, flash on the screen, …this little Lindows looking tour would come up and never go away… I’ve been in ITS for almost 18 years now so I’m not n00bing out w/ it.. it just flipped its lid and i formatted it as a way of giving back for the grief ;-p
I use Fedora, Gentoo, and FreeBSD regularly
Edited 2006-11-03 08:53