On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 10:14:04AM +0000, Syd Hancock wrote:
More seriously - checkout 9.1 if you want to see where mandrake has reached since v6, I can let you have a copy if interested.
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. Having to setup X windows by hand is not much fun and this is on recent hardware which debian can configure after asking a few questions, using the Mandrake wizard thing it managed to give me a flickery screen that gave me a headache after using it for 5 minutes. I will admit that no distro can autoconfigure this hardware 100% correctly though due to Nvidia having broken DDC transfers so that the distro can't speak directly to the monitor to find out what it does. 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).
Mandrake distro developers seem to do a good job, when allowed to get on with it, but mandrake management seems to be crap and to have very little idea of who their market is and how to grow it. Putting out very flaky distros is definitely not the way to do it.
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 :-/ It seems that 9.2 has had less testing than most of those other OS :( I am all for what they want to achieve and I do feel bad that they have had money problems recently but trying to charge for broken software does seem to not be a great business plan :(
Adam