On Wednesday 29 Oct 2003 12:56 pm, abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
To be honest, it still has the same old problems, the package management is poor, it tries to do things its own way and it isn't as "easy" as people make out. I have always had to do so much fiddling that I could just as well stick to debian
Anyone who has the skillset to install debian and get it fully working (including sound, networking, dvd playback etc) really doesn't need mandrake, no contest.
For people like myself - willing to learn, willing to do some config file editing etc but needing and wanting a useable machine as quickly and easily as possible - mandrake has served me well. But it certainly has its flaws and is not as stable as say debian appears to be.
On the other hand, on the linux-thinkpad list, I see discussions between people still trying to get things set up in debian that simply just work with mandrake - sound, suspend/resume, wireless networking, dvd playing to mention a few.
I think it is 'horses for courses' - what does the individual want to do. A few years ago in a different period of my life I would have had the time and space to discover how to fully install a fully working debian distro - I tried a couple of times but, for me at least, life is too short even though it would be fascinating.
I also think that, as in so many areas of life, perceived 'advantage' is really 'familiarity'. What we know and understand seems 'better' than the unfamiliar.
So, for example, I find mandrake package management using urpmi or the gui tools with its automatic dependancy-handling very simple. I've never had a problem with it (apart from need ing to refresh the list of mirrors from time to time). Apt may well be superior, I don't know. Redhat's rpm by contrast seems very laborious.
Although given when i tell the installer what the hardware is and its capabilities i would expect it to at least give me a setup that didn't flicker (and considering that this monitor will do at least 1920x1440@85Hz I wouldn't have thought Mandrake could have got it quite /that/ wrong).
Playing with a few options in the mandrake control panel might have helped, but maybe not. XFree seems a bit of a minefield to me - mandrake 9.1 did not have the correct driver for the Thinkpad T23 video card in Xfree 4.3 for example although Knoppix does.
They really are not doing themselves any favours or the linux community by saying "look how great we are for newbies" then releasing broken distros and selling them :-/
Totally agreed. Although AFAIK at the moment no-one is being *sold* mandrake 9.2 as only the download version is available (may have changed very recently). Also, uniquely amongst the major commercial distros, the entire mandrake distro is free/libre and available for free/beer download. No redistribution restrictions of any kind.
Unfortunately their poor business sense may give this approach a bad name - I don't think that their financial problems are caused by 'giving it away' but if they fail it will give amunition to the pro-proprietary software forces. But maybe if they were more ruthless at business they would not 'give it away' anyway so the plusses and minusses are simply two sides of the same coin.
Syd