does anybody feel sorry for Mandriva?

[karellen]

I was never a big adherent of this distro (even if I give the 2007 version a try), but anyway I know it had preety good times in the past and now...I mean they almost go bankrupt. is there a flaw in their business model, why their user-base is shrinking or other reasons that they continue to fall down?...Probably I'm just subjective, but today they've released mandriva 2007.1 and even in distrowatch page hit ranking it continues to descend (with 970...). this is not the case with other distros, at least when a new version is released they got some boost with the page hit...
Just some random thoughts....I don't know exactly why, but I always feel sad when a linux distribution face hard times (or even disappearance, for various reasons)

[BoneKracker]

They are French. (Just kidding.)
:)

[karellen]

They are French. (Just kidding.)
:)

:)....

[igknighted]

They got away from what gave them their strength... the community. The alienated their community by charging for advanced features and early access to the distro and many became rather annoyed. Also, they went from a 6mo. release cycle like most distro's to a one year cycle, less new stuff. Finally, the quality went down hill. I think they took development out of the community's hands and it suffered.

All that said, the club benefits are going away. They are releasing more regularly and the releases are better. In fact, 2007.1 just came out tonight (I'll have to take a look). I think their future as a distro is bright, but poorly thought out decidions by the company a few years back may haint them.

[BoneKracker]

igKnighted, you're a traitor. You should be rooting for the Yankees or the Mets!

I think their best bet now would be to pick a market niche to focus on. "Easy to use" is no longer a niche, so they need differentiation and they need to add value somehow.

Business model is a tricky thing. The product can't be "GNU/Linux", it's got to be whatever value you are adding. That can be development, integration, support, knowledge of and focus on the customer's industry, etc.

[karellen]

they are still in the top ten distros so I think it's only up to them how mandriva is going to perform in the future, as the competition is tougher and tougher (and now I'm thinking of ubuntu/opensuse/fedora :D...)

[coxy]

They sell this:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/company/press/pr/mandriva_today_launches_the_4gb_version_of_mandriv a_flash

Pretty appealing if you ask me. I have never tried Mandriva but that could get me interested.

[karellen]

pretty nice, but I believe there are some other distros that can be run from an usb flash key, and they come at no cost. I might be wrong, though...

[igknighted]

igKnighted, you're a traitor. You should be rooting for the Yankees or the Mets!

I think their best bet now would be to pick a market niche to focus on. "Easy to use" is no longer a niche, so they need differentiation and they need to add value somehow.

Business model is a tricky thing. The product can't be "GNU/Linux", it's got to be whatever value you are adding. That can be development, integration, support, knowledge of and focus on the customer's industry, etc.

EWWWWW!! I feel like any fan of linux should hate the Yankees due to the obvious M$ comparisons. And the mets are, well, the mets. I used to be a big BlueJays fan (I live closer to Toronto than New York, in fact Joe Carter was my hero as a kid), but that wore off after they faded after '93. Ever since the mid/early 90's I've been a braves fan... can't really tell you why, just liked them as a kid and now that I know better I still think they are one of the classiest and best run franchises in sports.

Lol, notice how I specify "Upstate", in order to distinguish myself from the mess that is NYC :)
</offtopic>

More on topic, I think Mandriva was on to something with their paid versions in 2007. Now they just need to back it up with free versions. They had a (to my knowledge the only) legal DVD playback for linux with LinDVD. They also offered Cedega for gamers with some versions. This type of thing is what will separate them, if anything... they need to get the word out!

[Adamant1988]

They made a lot of stupid moves which cost them their business, and their reputation. Not the least of which was firing the founder. So, they deserve what they can get.

[ComplexNumber]

i feel sorry for them. i used to use mandrake all the time, as it was Linux Format's favourite for a long time. the only feature i didn't like about the distro was the clunky menu that sometimes used to simply disappear into thin air. i had to cut and past the xdg-menu directory in order to restore it.
somewhere between 2 and 4 years ago, it went rapidly downhill. the last few reelases i've found to be very buggy.

[picpak]

I loved Mandriva back with 10.1, back when it was still called Mandrake and did a 6-month release cycle. It was indeed a very nice distro: easy installation, easy control panel, no need for a terminal -- I still go back to it from time to time.

However, with 10.2 (I think they marketed it as Mandriva 2005) everything went downhill. The installation became confusing, and asked too many questions. The control panel became cumbersome as well, because it took as long to read the confusing descriptions of each task as it did to do the task itself. The system itself became extremely buggy as well, as I couldn't use Konqueror for more than a few minutes before it would constantly crash. Then the start button was tagged with a piece of god-ugly bold writing that said "Start", which seriously brought down the look of the desktop, IMO. I was severely disappointed -- and switched to Ubuntu.

That being said, I think 10.2 was their first "bad" release, and when they started to lose their way.

[justin whitaker]

I have a Silver Club membership. I wanted to support a commercial Linux effort, and at the time SUSE was singing kumbaya with Microsoft.

The funny thing is, Mandriva has not changed at all. There are still alot of dependency errors when installing applications, there are a bunch of tweaks that make compiling things difficult, and there is not much of a community left to fall back on, and those that are left are, in a word, dicks.

The pros to Mandriva are pretty obvious, though: flexible, easy to administer, very pretty (Kubuntu should take notes).

I won't renew my membership.

[mykalreborn]

from what i've read on wikipedia they have been in bankruptcy since 2003.
i've used mandriva once, but it was when i didn't know anything about linux, so i can't really say if i liked it or not.
for this release, i think the best feature is metisse. i've seen some videos of it and i must say it's pretty cool, and this time it's practical too, which i cannot say about beryl or compiz. :p

[PryGuy]

Frankly, the only Linux distribution that got my appreciation was Ubuntu. A good ole 5.04. And I'm still a big fan of Ubuntu, waiting for 7.04. Mandriva is strange. Yet, one of the biggest mistakes was their business model that is hardly acceptable in the world of free software. They should've offered Mandriva as a free download from the very beginning.

[karellen]

Frankly, the only Linux distribution that got my appreciation was Ubuntu. A good ole 5.04. And I'm still a big fan of Ubuntu, waiting for 7.04. Mandriva is strange. Yet, one of the biggest mistakes was their business model that is hardly acceptable in the world of free software. They should've offered Mandriva for a free download not to sell it.

yes, I subscribe to this. imho Ubuntu is the best linux distro (in terms of easy-to-use, community, ideology, progress etc)

[plb]

It's the name.."Mandriva"..they should have kept it "Mandrake"...what were they thinking!? Mandriva sounds like the name for a one legged prostitute.

[Onyros]

It's the name.."Mandriva"..they should have kept it "Mandrake"...what were they thinking!? Mandriva sounds like the name for a one legged prostitute.Oh, and that's supposed to be a BAD thing? :P

Yeah, pretty much firing Gäel Duval was the last drop. I once respected them, but I'm not even curious about their releases anymore.

[plb]

I did give Mandrake a try about 7 years ago and never liked it.

[esaym]

The first distro I installed was mandrake back in 2003. I think it was version 10 or something. As a first time linux user I was not impressed. It just seemed like it could not do much. I went back to windows the next week. About a year later I bought a $300 laptop from ebay (350mhz 256mb ram). For some reason I though that "linux" meant "mandrake". I wanted linux installed on the laptop so I pulled out those mandrake cd's from the year before and installed them. I couldn't ever get the sound to work so I sold the laptop.

About a year after that, I was wanting to turn an old computer into a web server. Someone recommended I install slackware for that purpose so I did and it seemed to do the job well except it was very hard to update packages. About 2 years later after that I bought another $300 laptop from ebay (1ghz 768mb). I wanted only linux on it and I installed slackware. It went pretty well but I couldn't get Firefox 2 to install right because of pango requirements. I was about to give up on linux and then I found ubuntu. I stuck the live cd in and everything worked right out of the box and installing and updating software was a breeze! I was amazing.

I am very sad that I had never tried a debian based distro sooner. I think that the experience with mandrake really left a sour mark for linux with me for years.

However the next problem I am having is that I find ubuntu too simple. Now I am in the process of moving over to straight debian. I think it will work great for me. The good thing is I have been MS free for about a year now. :KS

[mykalreborn]

It's the name.."Mandriva"..they should have kept it "Mandrake"...what were they thinking!? Mandriva sounds like the name for a one legged prostitute.
they had to change the name. they were sued for copying the name of some wizard or something. :p

[luca.b]

Yet, one of the biggest mistakes was their business model that is hardly acceptable in the world of free software. They should've offered Mandriva as a free download from the very beginning.

Nevertheless, despite the irrationality of the company, I don't feel like bashing them. They employ one of the people who worked most for the Qt4 port of KDE (commit champion Laurent Montel), they're fairly desktop agnostic (KDE and GNOME get equal treatment), they also employ people working on interesting projects (Sebastian Trueg of k3b fame, now also working on the NEPOMUK project) and usually collaborate with upstream.

[jrusso2]

I used to be a Mandrake user from their first version 5.3 back in 98. It was not long before Mandake started the Mandrake Club and it was all downhill from there.

People soon had to pay and if you wanted the free version you had to wait.

I tried Mandriva 2007.1 and it was terrible and buggy.

Mandriva deserves what ever happens to them.

[macogw]

They have a "gaming edition" that comes with Cedega and I think the Sims. They're the only distro I've heard with a gaming version, and that's also the only way I've heard of to play the Sims. I've thought about switching for that (the Sims, I don't play other games, really), but I don't want to lose apt.

[macogw]

About a year after that, I was wanting to turn an old computer into a web server. Someone recommended I install slackware for that purpose so I did and it seemed to do the job well except it was very hard to update packages. About 2 years later after that I bought another $300 laptop from ebay (1ghz 768mb). I wanted only linux on it and I installed slackware. It went pretty well but I couldn't get Firefox 2 to install right because of pango requirements. I was about to give up on linux and then I found ubuntu. I stuck the live cd in and everything worked right out of the box and installing and updating software was a breeze! I was amazing.

I am very sad that I had never tried a debian based distro sooner. I think that the experience with mandrake really left a sour mark for linux with me for years.

However the next problem I am having is that I find ubuntu too simple. Now I am in the process of moving over to straight debian. I think it will work great for me. The good thing is I have been MS free for about a year now. :KS
Slackware doesn't have the annoying install problems anymore. They uh...ported?...apt-get and named it slapt-get a few years back.

I rent webspace, but I made sure to get it on a Debian server. Any server I ever set up will be Debian-based. I don't care if the packages are old as long as I don't have to worry about a crashing fileserver losing my stuff. My personal computer is bleeding edge Ubuntu, though. I think it's going to stay this way. I like having the new stuff. Since I won't really be interacting with a server in non-utility ways, and a server wouldn't have X, it's not like I'd need to worry about new graphics drivers or outdated Firefox or Banshee or whatnot.

[justin whitaker]

they had to change the name. they were sued for copying the name of some wizard or something. :p

They bought out Connectiva. Mandriva=Mandrake+Connectiva.

Awful name. Sounds like some drug for irritable bowel syndrome: if you have an irritable bowel, get yerself maximum strength Mandriva, the little yellow and blue pill.

:D

[karellen]

They bought out Connectiva. Mandriva=Mandrake+Connectiva.

Awful name. Sounds like some drug for irritable bowel syndrome: if you have an irritable bowel, get yerself maximum strength Mandriva, the little yellow and blue pill.

:D

:lolflag:

[ibanezix]

It's the name.."Mandriva"..they should have kept it "Mandrake"...what were they thinking!? Mandriva sounds like the name for a one legged prostitute.

Thank you! I always wanted to say I HATE THAT NAME and pretty much every other word that consists of parts of two other chopped words. Mandrake as a word means something, and so does Connectiva.

But what the hell does "Mandriva" mean? Or "modem" for that matter...?

[BarfBag]

I feel sorry for them as well, though I've always hated Mandrake/Mandriva. There's just nothing special or unique about them. Also, I know this is minor, but they use lilo and it's always screwed up my system.

[tbroderick]

I loved Mandrake 9.1 when it came out. It was the distro that made me switch to 100% GNU/Linux instead of dual-booting with Windows 98.

[wxnker]

=igknighted;2472625]They got away from what gave them their strength... the community. The alienated their community by charging for advanced features and early access to the distro and many became rather annoyed. Also, they went from a 6mo. release cycle like most distro's to a one year cycle, less new stuff. Finally, the quality went down hill. I think they took development out of the community's hands and it suffered.

These are some of the problems that made Mandriva suffer. That is the past though and this is the present.

Mandriva in the present:
- new versions every 6 mounths
- free access to the club forum which is improving
- special admins in the forum who make sure the product is developed based on users needs
- great 2007.1 version and improvements in the community.
- you can use it absolutely FREE with no problems. Saying everything else is wrong! It does not cost anything to be a Mandriva user.


All that said, the club benefits are going away. They are releasing more regularly and the releases are better. In fact, 2007.1 just came out tonight (I'll have to take a look). I think their future as a distro is bright, but poorly thought out decidions by the company a few years back may haint them.

I absolutely agree. Mandriva still suffers from mistakes in the past. A lot of things have improved since then and they are definately going in the right direction.

Product wise and technically they do a great job. Mandriva's 2007.1 Spring version is a wonderful Linux distro. In my opinion it's the very best and most user friendly distro I've tried. Great work Mandriva. I also see I bright future for this OS if they can overcome the errors in the past.


the last few reelases i've found to be very buggy.
The 2007.0 and 2007.1 versions are very stable and not buggy at all. I use 2007.1 everyday as my primary OS and it's rock solid.


The pros to Mandriva are pretty obvious, though: flexible, easy to administer, very pretty (Kubuntu should take notes).
I agree. Kubuntu should definitely take notes. Especially regarding the overall look and design. Mandriva 2007.1 looks far more professional than Kubuntu. It's all those little things.
Regarding your remarks on the community (I did not quote them) ... Well this is improving a lot. There is now a special admin Adam W in the forums whose main goal is to make sure the development of Mandriva suits the users needs.

-------------------------
Ubuntu users are very loyal to their distro and I understand why. I am an Kubuntu user myself. I'm primarily a Mandriva user though and I want to state my opinion because some of the statements made here are wrong. Some are based on the past mistakes by Mandriva. Some are based on the idea that being an Ubuntu user means every other distro is not as good as Ubuntu.
I love Ubuntu and I must admit that the community is the very best, no doubt BUT I will try to stay objective.
Judging from my use on both Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Mandriva I have to say that Mandriva is ahead. Especially design wise. Ubuntu on the other hands have some strong advantages to. Primarily "apt get/aptitude" is superior to urpmi/urpme, no doubt. But Ubuntu's real advantage to Mandriva is the community. Product wise I do believe that Mandriva 2007.1 is ahead of Feisty in many areas. That's not meant to critisize Ubuntu. It's just my opinion that Ubuntu will have to improve quite a lot to match Mandriva in terms of usability, design etc.

[awakatanka]

PClinuxOS is making a better mandriva then mandriva. But i hope they will be climbing up again and be like mandrake was before the 2 merged. Mandrake was always good for me.

[wxnker]

Have you tried MDV 2007.1 Spring? It was officially released yesterday, I think.
I absolutely love this new version. If PClinuxOS is making a better Mandriva than Mandriva then it has to be REAL good :rolleyes:

One thing though. Mandriva media mirrors are not yet as stable as I was used to in Ubuntu. They work though and that's the main thing.

[igknighted]

PClinuxOS is making a better mandriva then mandriva. But i hope they will be climbing up again and be like mandrake was before the 2 merged. Mandrake was always good for me.

Almost like many feel that Ubuntu makes a better Debian? Granted the dynamics are quite different, but I could certainly see Mandriva becoming a distro that other spawn from rather than use its OS directly.

[buzzz]

I tried 2007.1 RC3 and found it a bit buggy. Downloaded and set up 2007.1 today and it really is superb. Even the package manager seems to work properly now, although I still prefer apt / synaptic. Worth giving it a shot if you're a distro-hopper.

[wxnker]

I tried 2007.1 RC3 and found it a bit buggy. Downloaded and set up 2007.1 today and it really is superb. Even the package manager seems to work properly now, although I still prefer apt / synaptic. Worth giving it a shot if you're a distro-hopper.

Yeah I prefer apt/aptitude to. I really miss this when using Mandriva. I can live with urpmi though. It works and the software installer is very good indeed.

[awakatanka]

Yeah I prefer apt/aptitude to. I really miss this when using Mandriva. I can live with urpmi though. It works and the software installer is very good indeed.

Apt-get works in pclinuxos. But i'm going to try mandriva, like it try a lot of new distro versions.Maybe one of those distro will surprise me, and will replace mepis. (got some problems with it on my laptop, but sidux and kubuntu feisty also give me errors )

[wxnker]

Apt-get works in pclinuxos. But i'm going to try mandriva, like it try a lot of new distro versions.Maybe one of those distro will surprise me, and will replace mepis. (got some problems with it on my laptop, but sidux and kubuntu feisty also give me errors )

I've been thinking of trying out "Mepis". It seems nice

[jiminycricket]

Yes I just saw this story, as well: http://news.zdnet.com/2110-3513-6176881.html


Mandriva, a struggling seller of the Linux operating system, is in the process of raising "a minimum of 3 million euros," or $4.1 million, the French company said Monday. The funds will be used to exit bankruptcy protection and to complete the acquisition of server software company Linbox, a merger the companies agreed upon in September 2006 but have been unable to complete.

I used Mandrake 10 I think which I hated...but they do seem to be trying out new things recently, like Metisse.

[wxnker]

Business wise it seems Mandriva have made a lot of wrongs in the past. A shame really because product wise it's a very nice distro. I for one hope they'll make it work.

[igknighted]

Just tried Mandriva One 2007 spring, it was very solid. Nvidia graphics worked OOTB, compiz, beryl and metisse were all easy to ret up and use, and overall it seemed like a real solid system. It did flip out (as expected) when I tried to run IceWM (2 desktops on a single CD live CD? nice!) with compiz, but oh well. Overall it was very solid. A nice change from 2007.0, the kernel of which happens to not work with my mobo (I needed to, get this, boot the Fedora kernel with root set as the mandriva partition, get the sources and tools and compile, then set up and boot the custom kernel... it worked though, so I can't complain). So well done Mandriva!

[AdamWill]

Hi, everyone. This is rumour control, here are the facts :). I'm Adam Williamson, I work as the official forum rep for the Mandriva forums (among other things).

Taking things from the top:

Financially speaking, we've been in cessation de paiements for a while, which is not really the same thing as bankruptcy protection, since the French system is rather different. It was the closest comparison in the American system so it was widely used in articles discussing this at the time. It's not clear from the first post, but I think this thread is actually a response to the news that we're raising at least 3m euros in new capital, which is obviously good news from a financial perspective. Any further injections of capital from space-travelling squillionaires would, of course, be welcome - does anyone around here happen to know one? ;)

Yes, there are other distros that run from a USB key. We feel the value of Flash is that it's simple: you don't have to do any work, just pay us some money and we send it to you. No need to buy your own key and then fight with installing / flashing some distro onto it. It's a convenience thing. Plus it's cute and has the Mandriva logo on it :) It's been one of our most popular products ever, so far.

For those who seem to have been disappointed with releases around 10.0 through 2006, please do give the new release a shot. There were definitely some problems with quality control in those releases (I'm on public record as being very angry about some of the issues that were allowed into the final release of 2006, for instance), but this has been vastly improved recently, and I'm pretty confident you'll find the quality of 2007.1 to be much, much higher. Many long time users have been calling it the best Mandriva release ever.

pryguy, Mandriva has *always* been available as a free download, ever since we began in 1998. For a few releases, the public release was delayed a month from the Club release, but that's as restricted as it ever got, and it's not the case any more (since 2007.0, public and Club releases have been on the same day again).

The name change was indeed occasioned by a lawsuit. We were sued by Hearst Publications, who own the rights to the Mandrake the Magician comic strip, in the U.S. The court decided that there was indeed a significant risk of people confusing a syndicated comic strip and a Linux distribution, so we had to change the name. The merger with Conectiva happened around that time, so we had an internal poll of names based around the Mandrake / Conectiva connection, which Mandriva won.

macogw, the gaming edition was a one-off a long time ago (it was based on, er, 9.1 I think...maybe 9.2...) and we haven't done another one since. Commercial versions of 2007.0 did include Cedega and the game Flatout, but that's about it.

barfbag, we switched to grub as default with 2007.1, and you've always been able to choose grub instead of lilo during installation if you prefer it (now you can choose lilo instead of grub).

edit: oh, and I forgot to mention, despite being an English guy living in Vancouver, I am a staunch Mets fan ;). And to head off anyone thinking 'bandwagon', I have been since 2002. For anyone with a short memory, the Mets' 2002 record was 75-86, bottom of the NL East...ahh, bad times. :P

[awakatanka]

I'm testing it now on my laptop, so far i like the color and the bootscreen. Dunno if its stable yet because of the shortime i'm using it. Can see that pclinuxos is based on mandriva because "configure youre computer" is exactly the same.
Love the background , hoping it will suprise me more when i test it more.

Maybe i buy that cool usb stick,it looks cool.

Thxs AdamWill for clearing something.

[JeevesBond]

Hi, everyone. This is rumour control, here are the facts
Wasn't that what the bloke in Alien III said just before the Alien crashed through the ceiling, munching him down like an old Twix?


English guy living in Vancouver
I'm an English guy living in Kitchener/Waterloo, what's your excuse for moving? Mine was a woman. :)

Mandriva does look good, particularly that USB thingamy. As you said it's the convenience and swanky logo that make it worth paying for. Metisse is something I've been looking forward to as well. It seems like a very functional idea.

[AdamWill]

Guilty as charged - *I'm* the guy who liked Alien 3. You found me.

And my reason was similar :)

[Hendrixski]

Hi, everyone. This is rumour control, here are the facts :). I'm Adam Williamson, I work as the official forum rep for the Mandriva forums (among other things).

Taking things from the top:

Financially speaking, we've been in cessation de paiements for a while, which is not really the same thing as bankruptcy protection, since the French system is rather different. It was the closest comparison in the American system so it was widely used in articles discussing this at the time. It's not clear from the first post, but I think this thread is actually a response to the news that we're raising at least 3m euros in new capital, which is obviously good news from a financial perspective. Any further injections of capital from space-travelling squillionaires would, of course, be welcome - does anyone around here happen to know one? ;)

Yes, there are other distros that run from a USB key. We feel the value of Flash is that it's simple: you don't have to do any work, just pay us some money and we send it to you. No need to buy your own key and then fight with installing / flashing some distro onto it. It's a convenience thing. Plus it's cute and has the Mandriva logo on it :) It's been one of our most popular products ever, so far.

For those who seem to have been disappointed with releases around 10.0 through 2006, please do give the new release a shot. There were definitely some problems with quality control in those releases (I'm on public record as being very angry about some of the issues that were allowed into the final release of 2006, for instance), but this has been vastly improved recently, and I'm pretty confident you'll find the quality of 2007.1 to be much, much higher. Many long time users have been calling it the best Mandriva release ever.

pryguy, Mandriva has *always* been available as a free download, ever since we began in 1998. For a few releases, the public release was delayed a month from the Club release, but that's as restricted as it ever got, and it's not the case any more (since 2007.0, public and Club releases have been on the same day again).

The name change was indeed occasioned by a lawsuit. We were sued by Hearst Publications, who own the rights to the Mandrake the Magician comic strip, in the U.S. The court decided that there was indeed a significant risk of people confusing a syndicated comic strip and a Linux distribution, so we had to change the name. The merger with Conectiva happened around that time, so we had an internal poll of names based around the Mandrake / Conectiva connection, which Mandriva won.

macogw, the gaming edition was a one-off a long time ago (it was based on, er, 9.1 I think...maybe 9.2...) and we haven't done another one since. Commercial versions of 2007.0 did include Cedega and the game Flatout, but that's about it.

barfbag, we switched to grub as default with 2007.1, and you've always been able to choose grub instead of lilo during installation if you prefer it (now you can choose lilo instead of grub).

edit: oh, and I forgot to mention, despite being an English guy living in Vancouver, I am a staunch Mets fan ;). And to head off anyone thinking 'bandwagon', I have been since 2002. For anyone with a short memory, the Mets' 2002 record was 75-86, bottom of the NL East...ahh, bad times. :P

Thank you for posting. I really like how well mandriva functions out of the box, and I'm glad to hear that mandriva is still kicking.