What is Mandriva like?

[j.miller565]

I just like to know how Mandriva is like compared to other Linux distros.

[ThinkBuntu]

In a word, slow. There's nothing you'll be missing by using it's derivative, PCLinuxOS which is faster.

[pelle.k]

I tried the latest "one 2007 spring", and it's as snappy as any other kde distro on my machine. I'm guessing i don't feel the difference any more with my beefy core2duo and whatnot under the hood...
I wrote a reply in this thread about it; http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=426746

As a no fuss kde distro, i think it's rather nice. I would probably use it as my "get some work done" distro if i could get it to suspend my hardware.

[Adamant1988]

Mandriva is a fine show of corporate Linux, except for one UGLY GLARING piece of software that they insist on using... URPMI. It is probably the single worst package manager I have ever seen in my life.

[kelvin spratt]

i started with Mandriva it was always breaking for me could not get Ati to work correct and not very professional loosey support

[Hallvor]

I tried Mandriva 2007 spring, and was very impressed by it. Worked completely out of the box on a laptop. It is not sluggish at all. The only bad thing about it I can think of is the package manager and small community. But as everything worked, I didn`t need a large community.

[jubjubrsx]

i went from mandriva to ubuntu im like holey moley its sooo much faster.....and more of a memory hog ....after bootup i was using a touch over 400mb of ram....with ubuntu im pushing just over 200...

[n8ek]

I find that Mandriva runs just sweet on my Packard bell laptop 3.2gig processor 512ram 128 mb gc, you don't always need to use urpmi to find software most of its in the Mandriva control center, i prefer it to Kubuntu and the community is very helpfull even though its small.

[dpmccoy]

I cut my teeth on Mandrake 9.x from 2003-2005, and Mandriva 2006 after that.

I thought it was great compared to what I started with (Fedora 1.0), but, since I switched to Ubuntu this January, I would never go back.

It just feels strange. I agree with a previous poster that URPMI is dreadful.

Mandriva is originally French [I believe], and you end up with some strangely translated dialog boxes to respond to.

[ThinkBuntu]

I just like to know how Mandriva is like compared to other Linux distros.
All I know is that it ran slowly in every stage (app launching, login, shutdown, startup) on my laptop. It did loko very pretty while doing it, but I care more about productivity. I have a 1.6GHz ThinkPad T41 with 1.5GB RAM and a standard 80GB HD. And by slowly, I mean not nearly as fast as Ubuntu, PCLOS, or others. I'd say its speed was on par with Sabayon and openSUSE.

[pelle.k]

I've noticed that some distros do work with my gf7600gt and "nv" driver out of the box. (the nv driver isn't really supposed to support gf7600gt). When they do work with "nv" driver, they all range between dog slow to rather snappy, until i install the "nvidia" driver. After that, they pretty much feel the same to me (more or less... you can't really compare suse and arch :) )
Are you sure this isn't what you were experiencing ThinkBuntu? Just a thought.

[ThinkBuntu]

I've noticed that some distros do work with my gf7600gt and "nv" driver out of the box. (the nv driver isn't really supposed to support gf7600gt). When they do work with "nv" driver, they all range between dog slow to rather snappy, until i install the "nvidia" driver. After that, they pretty much feel the same to me (more or less... you can't really compare suse and arch :) )
Are you sure this isn't what you were experiencing ThinkBuntu? Just a thought.

I use an ATI driver, and the slowness I noticed wasn't related to graphics or anything related to that. Who knows? But I've never had a problem with hardware recognition with any distribution.

[Adamant1988]

I cut my teeth on Mandrake 9.x from 2003-2005, and Mandriva 2006 after that.

I thought it was great compared to what I started with (Fedora 1.0), but, since I switched to Ubuntu this January, I would never go back.

It just feels strange. I agree with a previous poster that URPMI is dreadful.

Mandriva is originally French [I believe], and you end up with some strangely translated dialog boxes to respond to.

I spoke with Adam Williamson (I think that's his name) about removing URPMI or moving to another distro as a base for Mandriva and he basically said "No, that's our heritage".

[intrepi]

The reports I've read doesn't lead me to switch from Xandros Professional 4.0 which is the full commercial version. I tried the commercial version of SuSE and never found it to be a distro I liked but I'm still looking around myself but Mandriva is not a distro I'll be going with soon. I prefer Full distro versions or commercial versions rather than the free downloadable versions due to the fact that the full versions are more complete, come with more software and support. Xandros has some issues but none that I can't live with as overall, I like it and it works for me. If you are unsure of what distro to buy or try, take your time and read whatever reviews you can find, then try what you think might be good for you. :p

[justin whitaker]

Mandriva is no better or worse than any of the other RPM distributions. I have a Silver Club membership, and it's worth it, I guess, to see what they are up to...

Mandriva is nowhere near the memory hog it used to be, and there are lots of good reasons to use it, starting with the Command Center, the amount of applications available, the overall look and feel...the downside is the whole RPM dependency hell thing, the locking up of the repositories, and the fact that Mandriva seems to be undergoing something of a continual bloodletting to get back to profitability.

Ubuntu is my daily desktop. Mandriva is a very pretty summer fling. ;)

[Adamant1988]

Mandriva is no better or worse than any of the other RPM distributions. I have a Silver Club membership, and it's worth it, I guess, to see what they are up to...

Mandriva is nowhere near the memory hog it used to be, and there are lots of good reasons to use it, starting with the Command Center, the amount of applications available, the overall look and feel...the downside is the whole RPM dependency hell thing, the locking up of the repositories, and the fact that Mandriva seems to be undergoing something of a continual bloodletting to get back to profitability.

Ubuntu is my daily desktop. Mandriva is a very pretty summer fling. ;)

Actually, the dependency problems you have are not RPM, they are the repos sucking and URPMI being the most awful, poorly aged package manager ever.

[j.miller565]

Thanks for all the info everyone. I think I may try PCLinuxOS instead of Mandriva. A lot of people say it's pretty good too.

[ffi]

Mandriva is pretty damn fast on my system, especially the boot time and all applications are generally very responsive.

Urpmi is a fine package manager, it' s quite fast but not as fast as apt-get and handles depencies quite well, though I prefer smart.

Incedently last week I installed pclinuxos because their fonts looked crapped I forced the installation of libfreetyp2e and freetype2-tools from mandriva-cooker it took me hours to find a solution to actually remove these and install the original packages without deinstalling my entire base system because most of the system depended freetype and apt-get would let me install nor uninstall anything anymore....

[Qew]

Actually, the dependency problems you have are not RPM, they are the repos sucking and URPMI being the most awful, poorly aged package manager ever.

It would be quite interesting for you to tell us why urpmi is so poor rather than repeat it. Why is it poor? Have you studied it and used it extensively? How does it not compare to apt-get? Come on, give us a few good reasons other than "it sucks".

The first distro I used back in 2002 was Mandrake 8.2, which, in its time, was a fine choice for the new Linux user to make. I stuck with Mandrake/Mandrive because it was the sort of distro that you could grow with; it's not just a distro where the GUI is the only means to modify it, you can easily configure it by hand if you want. urpmi, once you've got the hang of it and its uses, is quite powerful and capable of upgrading your machine to the next version of Mandriva (I did this a few times, going from 9.1 to 2006 via urpmi upgrades, using etc-update to merge or fix config files, and it worked out fine with only a few niggles). I prefer apt-get, but can't see why urpmi is given such short shrift by a few here. BTW, I never got "dependency hell" using urpmi, because if you read up on it and its man pages, you won't find yourself in such a mess in the first place.

I have fond memories of Mandrake/Mandriva, because it's where I started with Linux, but we all have to move on/great things come to an end. I went on to Xubuntu from Mandriava and am now currently running Debian, but Mandriva will still be in my memories.

[DR_K13]

I started with Suse , then moved to Redhat then Mandrake then a ton of others , then Ubuntu.

Mandrake was the first distro that I actually " got "

so I tend to be fond of it eventhough I don't use it anymore.

[thegnome87]

I'm also fond of Mandriva because it's the first distro I ever installed. It does have a distinctive European feel to it as well in some of its artwork and design.

I don't think urpmi is as bad as before, they've cleaned up the interface and functionality significantly because the last time I used it (2006) it was a nightmare (not a good experience for a first time Linux user).

I just don't like the company much. Not so much because they gave the Gael guy the boot, but because you're basically a 2nd class citizen if you don't join their club. Sure, I understand they need monetary support but $66 or $138 a year to get proprietary codecs is a little too much for me.

Even Linspire charges only $50 a year for their CNR Gold membership.

One thing that Mandriva has going for it that kicks butt (besides its control center) is it's great partitioning tool. It's easy to use and it has left many a Windows partition immaculately untouched.

How is Mandriva? There's only one way to know. (http://www.mandriva.com/download) ;)

[Hallvor]

"Sure, I understand they need monetary support but $66 or $138 a year to get proprietary codecs is a little too much for me."

I believe most codecs worked out of the box for me in the 2007 spring edition. Had to install flash and java, though, but it was very easy.

[thegnome87]

"Sure, I understand they need monetary support but $66 or $138 a year to get proprietary codecs is a little too much for me."

I believe most codecs worked out of the box for me in the 2007 spring edition. Had to install flash and java, though, but it was very easy.

It's not just you, a lot of the major codecs do work out of the box. I had 2007.1 installed on my computer and it was pretty impressive to boot so a newbie would be incredibly well off with a boxed version or even just Mandriva One. Also, in all fairness, the club can be a good add-on if you choose to definitively stick with Mandriva. :smile:

[ffi]

You dont pay for the codecs and proprietary stuff but for support and some commercial software like cedega and vmware, the codecs are free. I havent paid for the powerpack but i have heard many stories that the support given with the powerpack really was mandrivas weak point, it made many people very disappointed in mandriva.

[AdamWill]

Ooh, another MDV thread. :)

adamant, the reason I gave for not switching from urpmi is not 'it's our heritage'. It's basically that urpmi has all the functionality we need from a package manager, and switching to another one would be a significant drain on resources with no real benefit, because there is no package manager we can switch to that would be really any better than urpmi.

We are happy to resolve any actual bugs reported in urpmi (a candidate update for 2007 Spring just hit the repositories yesterday fixing a few minor bugs). "It sucks" is not a bug report and is extremely hard to base any constructive work upon.

Please by all means try out 2007 Spring One and let me know what you actually find wrong with urpmi. It has been updated significantly since you last ran MDK / MDV (that I know of).

Thanks to everyone else for the interesting comments, threads like this are always useful to read.

On proprietary stuff: non-free hardware drivers, firmware, and some other bits (notably Java) are available from our public non-free repository, which is available to all and hosted right alongside our free software repositories on our public mirrors. These widgets are also included in the freely-downloadable One edition as well as the commercial editions; if you install One, or a commercial edition, the NVIDIA / ATI drivers, wireless firmware etc that you need will be automatically installed. They are not included in the Free edition because part of the point of that edition is to be free-as-in-speech as well as free-as-in-beer.