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        Science & Technology >> Linux, BSD & Open Source >> Mandriva 2008 Mini Review
        
(Message started by: ReeBop on Mar 9^th, 2008, 7:43pm)

Title: Mandriva 2008 Mini Review
Post by ReeBop on Mar 9^th, 2008, 7:43pm

I decided on doing a mini review of Mandriva on Geeksters.org.

http://www.geeksters.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=778

As I think about that review I did a couple of days ago, it is a bit of a contrast on how much of a "wow" factor I get from people who see my desktop and those problems I had "under the hood" to get it to where I wanted it. It was not troublefree and perhaps I was a little too easy on the Mandriva folks. Maybe it is because I have used their distributions for so many years. Like I mentioned in the review, I can't blame Mandriva fully for the problems I had getting a common wireless networking device working. Maybe instead on working so hard on bizarre 3D desktop effects, more work needs to be done on the driver front. Let's face it, a newbie would be completely lost trying to get wireless working on this laptop. It took me over an hour of research and tinkering to do it myself and I'm a 15+ year plus Linux user. I am happy though with webcam driver progress and the guy who carries the banner for webcams on Linux has really done some nice work. It is time though for the Linux community to make it part of their distributions "out of the box" and not as an extra download. I hope those days are coming soon.

What I can blame Mandriva for is the RPM database bug for those who upgrade. There is no excuse for that one. I strongly disagree with those that say that you have to wipe your old Linux and reinstall everything from scratch. Sure, experienced hands will tell you that doing that is no problem but for most folks, the idea of wiping everything and trusting your installation process not to touch your home partition is rather scary. Also, it took the Mandriva folks well over a month to give users a workaround for this. I do not think an actual fix was ever given out. I wonder if that will be fixed in the upcoming 2008.1 "Spring" release or just swept under the rug?

It all comes back to what many users saw in the promise of what Linux could be. The promise was timely release of security and bug patches, ease of use, customization, good performance on older hardware and several others. If it wasn't for projects such as Puppy Linux or Deli Linux, I would think that Linux has lost its way. Sure, it does fantastic work in the server room but as time moves along, we get prettier and more resource hungry software that never seems to get optimized properly. There are many who have no computers, yet we are filling landfills full of what could be usable old business equipment. Also, the "my distribution is shinier than yours" attitude that I get from the Ubuntu crowd does not do the whole Linux community any favors. Ok, enough of a review and rant. Mandriva 2008 is a fine system but I know (and they should know it too) that it can be much better. Let's hope they get it right with "Spring" 2008.1.

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