Switching from Ubuntu to..... Mandriva?

[cazmatazzz]

Hello! I've been an enthusiastic Ubuntu and Xubuntu user for quite some time now. About three years ago when my windows XP started giving me such critters, I was tempted to throw my laptop out of the window. Because I could not find my original XP cd I decided it was time to try something new. And so I installed Ubuntu.

Now after three years of using ubuntu the same temptation is arising, although this time not out of annoyance, to try something new.

So my quest for a new distro has started. What I want is a stable and fast system that allows me to tweak certain bits (I am not exactly a beginner but then to call myself intermediate.... well I guess it depends on your scale of reference) but not the whole shabang. Also I love choice, thereby meaning large repositories and who doesn't adore a nice look and feel.

Thus! Which distro to choose? there are soooo many options, I have been looking at Mint, pclinuxos and Mandriva. I guess I am looking for something similar to Ubuntu but more advanced maybe.


I sure hope this rant makes any sense.

[SuperSonic4]

Mint is ubuntu. Except for a few different programs and themes. But they share the same repos and packaging etc

PClinuxOS I've never looked at.

Mandriva is an excellent distrobution IMO. You can install either gnome or kde and both are well made and supported. Personally I think it is the best KDE4 there is. You can tweak it well and the Mandriva Control Centre will do that rather easily with a GUI. There are large repos and although a nice look and feel is subjective I think mandriva has the best default theme but again it can be changed

[Down8ve]

I'm running Mandriva One KDE4 2009 right now. I agree, it is the best KDE4 experience at the moment, and will only improve with time. It is quite stable and I have had no showstoppers on my rather generic system.

OpenSuSE 11.1 is looking very good too, but I have finally gotten Mandy to behave as I wish... although I wish my Firefox Fonts were better. Picasa install was easy, right from Google's website. It also uses Pulse Audio.

Sorry for the rambling.

[Cresho]

I remember mandrake/mandriva. It is the best kde out there. Is this still a french company?

[AdamWill]

French / Brazilian - we merged with Conectiva (hence Mandriva).

cazmatazz: just try a bunch and see what you like. Try Mandriva, of course. Try Fedora, SUSE, PCLOS, Mepis...no-one can really tell you what you will like best, you can only try the options and see what works for you.

[Vulpus]

Thus! Which distro to choose? there are soooo many options, I have been looking at Mint, pclinuxos and Mandriva. I guess I am looking for something similar to Ubuntu but more advanced maybe.

In recent months I have become less sympathetic to all the variations of distros that are out there. I have tried Mint and it is very nice but basically it is just Ubuntu configured in a particular way. Likewise PCLinuxOS is mainly Mandriva with Synaptic added.

Personally I think that Mandriva is the best distro out there, though it is not everyone's cup of tea and is quite a bit different from Ubuntu. If you prefer the Gnome desktop then I suggest Fedora.

[Down8ve]

Just figured out an annoyance I had with Mandriva's streaming playback using various media players. The default setting was for a T1 line, and I'm on DSL. Once I changed that setting I no longer had stuttering internet playback on the "movie player." I'm at work at the moment and cannot remember which app it was (KDE4).

Now if I could only get Amarok to not stutter on some Shoutcast streams.

[wolfen69]

If you prefer the Gnome desktop then I suggest Fedora.

why? mandriva does gnome very well.

[kaldor]

Try out Fedora. Very popular and stable Distro with both Gnome and KDE. Feels a lot like Ubuntu.

[Sorivenul]

Thought I had posted here already.
Mandriva is a good distribution, but is not "more advanced" than Ubuntu. My vote goes to Debian. If you know Ubuntu, the basics of Debian will be familiar, but there is more manual work and configuration involved with a Debian system. It is almost always my suggestion for a "next step after Ubuntu".

[Vulpus]

why? mandriva does gnome very well.


Sorry, I should have said that "if you prefer the Gnome desktop you should ALSO try Fedora".

I know that a lot of people use Gnome on Mandriva but for me I think it is more of a KDE distro. I have always thought that certain distros seem to be 'more comfortable' with certain desktops. For example I think that Ubuntu is very much a Gnome oriented distro. I have used it with KDE but it never seemed as good.

[cazmatazzz]

yesterday i installed mandriva on my laptop, which is now up and running. after getting a very annoying grub error 2 i managed to get it going. it just seems my system is running slower than before, which is definitely something i did not want.

it was nice how everyhting worked right away but that does not measure against the general slowness its experiencing now. especially with transmission running it excrutiatingly slow.... which it wasnt before.

so i guess i might be switching back to ubuntu (the new one?) quite soon....

or maybe i'll give debian a shot. i do thin i want to stick to gnome.
well thanks for all your help, any more suggestions are of course always welcome!!!!

[cazmatazzz]

maybe mandriva is slower because i decided to stick with gnome...

[AdamWill]

It's hard to know exactly what you mean - "it's slow" isn't a very helpful description :)

What's slow, exactly? Network transfers are slow? Opening apps is slow? Response is slow?

Is the hard disk getting thrashed? Have you looked at a process monitor to see if something's using a lot of CPU time or RAM?

FWIW, I use GNOME and always have.

[AdamWill]

It's hard to know exactly what you mean - "it's slow" isn't a very helpful description :)

What's slow, exactly? Network transfers are slow? Opening apps is slow? Response is slow?

Is the hard disk getting thrashed? Have you looked at a process monitor to see if something's using a lot of CPU time or RAM?

FWIW, I use GNOME and always have.

[cazmatazzz]

yes sorry for that rather vague description. applications take some time to respond, for instance starting firefox can take up to 30 second also closing it can be a drag. i have capped the upload rate on transmission (which i think was the problem) and that has helped a bit. but i have discovered that my laptop doesnt shut down. when i press 'shut down' from the menu it does nothing. so its been in suspend at night....

anyways although i like the system i just don't think its for me. if i have some time on my hands i think i might try some more advanced distros but i think untill then i'll revert back to ubuntu....

[rakris]

Between Ubuntu and Mandriva, I would choose Ubuntu.
And every wise person would do the same.

[Vulpus]

Between Ubuntu and Mandriva, I would choose Ubuntu.
And every wise person would do the same.

I think it is partly down to personal choice and partly how well your hardware works from scratch with a particular distro.

Ubuntu is certainly very good but personally I think Mandriva is better. Ubuntu just seems a little dull and old fashioned compared with Mandriva.

[TeaAge]

Between Ubuntu and Mandriva, I would choose Ubuntu.
And every wise person would do the same.

very wise comment.
You mean to choose a distro has nothing to do with taste?
You mean there is no computer were distro A works great but distro B doesn`t?

Maybe you want to add why ubuntu is that better than mandriva, that would be very interesting for unwise people like me.

Thanks,
TeaAge

[rakris]

Yes its a personal choice.
To complete the sentence i added "wise persons". :D

But last time i checked, mandriva's package manager was bad.:(

[athaki]

PCLinuxOS: I'd wait until the 2009 version comes out
Mandriva: It does GNOME well, and KDE4 isn't all that bad either. It has a nice computer control center.
Fedora: When I was able to install it (bad burns on my part) it was very nice
openSUSE: It's alright. YaST is getting better.
Debian: Nice and stable because it's conservative.

Of course at the end of the day it's up to you to decide what you want to do. Try them all out if you really want to using Virtualbox. It scratches my itch.

[Vulpus]

But last time i checked, mandriva's package manager was bad.:(

Errm, no its not! The package manager works very well and IMHO is slightly better than synaptic. But again it is down to personal choice.

[AdamWill]

cazmatazz: that's certainly unusual. is it only network-related operations that seem slow? do non-network related apps (gedit, for instance) open fast, or slow?

[MasterNetra]

PCLinuxOS: I'd wait until the 2009 version comes out
Mandriva: It does GNOME well, and KDE4 isn't all that bad either. It has a nice computer control center.
Fedora: When I was able to install it (bad burns on my part) it was very nice
openSUSE: It's alright. YaST is getting better.
Debian: Nice and stable because it's conservative.

Of course at the end of the day it's up to you to decide what you want to do. Try them all out if you really want to using Virtualbox. It scratches my itch.

Doesn't new Debian releases come very slowly? Like slower then Microsoft releases new OS Clones?

[Vulpus]

Doesn't new Debian releases come very slowly?

That actually is their main 'selling point'. Their releases are always super stable and they seldom, if ever, include bleeding edge software. Take a look here:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20081027#feature

[AdamWill]

Main selling point or biggest weakness, depends entirely on what you want. :) A lot of people run Debian sid and use it as a rolling distro; you do need a bit of flexibility to do that, though. Even though it's probably not as hairy as Mandriva Cooker or Fedora Rawhide, it's still a development branch.

[hrod beraht]

Check out the independence list at Distrowatch (http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=independence). If you want to pick something similar to Ubuntu, you can look in the based on Debian section. Or if you want something different, check out the other sections. My favorite is the independently developed section ;)

Bob

[AdamWill]

That list is in severe need of an update, methinks :)

[Sorivenul]

That list is in severe need of an update, methinks :)
There are many things on DistroWatch in need of an update. They finally got around to updating their "Major Distributions" list recently.

[SunnyRabbiera]

mandriva has a fairly nice sized repository though its no where near as big as the one in Ubuntu.

[tubasoldier]

I've got Mandriva 2009 running on my media pc. IMO it is great. There are a few little things here and there that I don't like, but i also don't have to go looking for workarounds most of the time. It does a great job of implementing KDE.

I've also used Fedora. Its a nice distro as well. I removed it only because I had a package mananger problem and could not figure out how to fix it. I thought about re-installing it but with Fedora 10 they no longer use an xorg.conf file, relying on dbus to properly detect your hardware. My hardware sucks, so that doesn't happen.

OpenSuse isn't too bad. Last I used it the Yast control center was slower than molasses in the antartic. But I never had to touch the command line for system configuration. Not once.

[Saint Angeles]

sometimes i get really bored with my ubuntu because everything works so damn well.

so i go on a distro search and i try a few things... but i ALWAYS come back to ubuntu.

it just works great and i love the repos.

[Naiki Muliaina]

Mandriva took the prize for worst distro for years for me. That is untill the 2008 release. It didnt grip me enough to pull me from Ubuntu and its derivatives. But my partners been running the free edition for 6-8 months now with only a couple of problems.

Mandriva 2009 looks fantastic, though of course she hasnt given it a good run in yet. Mandriva can do Gnome, but in all honesty it feels much much better with KDE. The only real negative i find with Mandriva is the community. Even my missus has commented on not getting help on the forum. Weve also noticed Mandriva users are often the first to put down Ubuntu on techy blogs. Didnt realy notice it untill she got into Mandriva. That of course doesnt say something about the whole Mandriva community. Its prolly the same small group of people being a pain heh.

[AdamWill]

naiki: what do you find lacking about GNOME? I've always run GNOME, I don't particularly like KDE, and I have no feeling that there's anything lacking in our GNOME packages.

If you don't get an answer for something on the forum, it's because no-one there knows the answer. That's all. I don't think there's anything wrong with the MDV community at all, I think it's a great group of people.

sunny: Just for info: I can't find a source package count for Ubuntu, unfortunately, but Intrepid has 29,361 binary packages, to 2009's 18,000 or so (I didn't do an exact count yet). Of course, a lot of Ubuntu packages are Debian packages with very few modifications.

[AdamWill]

naiki: what do you find lacking about GNOME? I've always run GNOME, I don't particularly like KDE, and I have no feeling that there's anything lacking in our GNOME packages.

If you don't get an answer for something on the forum, it's because no-one there knows the answer. That's all. I don't think there's anything wrong with the MDV community at all, I think it's a great group of people.

sunny: Just for info: I can't find a source package count for Ubuntu, unfortunately, but Intrepid has 29,361 binary packages, to 2009's 18,000 or so (I didn't do an exact count yet). Of course, a lot of Ubuntu packages are Debian packages with very few modifications.

[doorknob60]

Debian or Arch. Don't mess with that Mandriva crap (sorry, I've never really like it, it just feels to proprietary for my tastes).

[SuperSonic4]

Mandriva took the prize for worst distro for years for me. That is untill the 2008 release. It didnt grip me enough to pull me from Ubuntu and its derivatives. But my partners been running the free edition for 6-8 months now with only a couple of problems.

Mandriva 2009 looks fantastic, though of course she hasnt given it a good run in yet. Mandriva can do Gnome, but in all honesty it feels much much better with KDE. The only real negative i find with Mandriva is the community. Even my missus has commented on not getting help on the forum. Weve also noticed Mandriva users are often the first to put down Ubuntu on techy blogs. Didnt realy notice it untill she got into Mandriva. That of course doesnt say something about the whole Mandriva community. Its prolly the same small group of people being a pain heh.

The only real problem I've found with the Mandriva forums is that you need to read/write good French to get a lot of help :p

Mandriva expert is an excellent source for answers though

[SuperSonic4]

Mandriva took the prize for worst distro for years for me. That is untill the 2008 release. It didnt grip me enough to pull me from Ubuntu and its derivatives. But my partners been running the free edition for 6-8 months now with only a couple of problems.

Mandriva 2009 looks fantastic, though of course she hasnt given it a good run in yet. Mandriva can do Gnome, but in all honesty it feels much much better with KDE. The only real negative i find with Mandriva is the community. Even my missus has commented on not getting help on the forum. Weve also noticed Mandriva users are often the first to put down Ubuntu on techy blogs. Didnt realy notice it untill she got into Mandriva. That of course doesnt say something about the whole Mandriva community. Its prolly the same small group of people being a pain heh.

The only real problem I've found with the Mandriva forums is that you need to read/write good French to get a lot of help :p

Mandriva expert is an excellent source for answers though

[kaffeboy]

I tried Mandriva 2009, and I liked it very much. It supported all my hardware out of the box, but I´m not a big fan of KDE 4 since it has numerous bugs. Windows didnt close or minimize properly, sometimes I couldnt see video, etc.

Ubuntu 8.04 is great, but it didn´t support all my hardware...but now that I´m on 8.10, I feel as if there is no better OS out there for this machine.

[TeaAge]

Debian or Arch. Don't mess with that Mandriva crap (sorry, I've never really like it, it just feels to proprietary for my tastes).

So, when did you last time try it? It's not more proprietary than any other distro.
2008.1 was the best distro i've ever used and 2009.0 is also great, only KDE 4 is not that functional.

Regards,
TeaAge

[factotum218]

Doesn't new Debian releases come very slowly? Like slower then Microsoft releases new OS Clones?

For some that's a plus. It's allowed more time to be productive and less time upgrading software that I never really needed to in the first place. I mean c'mon pulse audio? It would be great if any applications I would find it usefull for actually worked with it. (Rosegarden, Hydrogen, stuff like that). I discovered a long time ago that newer does not mean better.

With offerings like Slackware, Debian and even Gentoo I never had a problem. The thing is that there is a trade off. Nothing is really free(beer). The more time you have to put into manually setting things up correctly the less issues I had while working even when upgrading to new distributions. But the desktop sector (*buntu, opensuse, fedora, and others that get recommended by users as windows xp replacements) do install and boot up, but I end up elbow deep in .config guts rearranging and fixing automated assumptions from the install. That, and I prefer the bsd-like init system vs. the typical sys-v type arrangements.

I like the old outdated manual way of setting things up. Of course your mileage may vary. In fact you may well end up getting out and walking. But in most cases is a great learning experience and nothing that can't be made easier with a few fun-packed bash scripts of your own.

When all else fails, RUTE (http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz) it.
:)

[AdamWill]

kaffeboy: did you try using GNOME or some other desktop on Mandriva? Mandriva is desktop-agnostic, it's not expected that you will use KDE.

factotum: actually, Pulse is expressly not designed for pro audio apps like the ones you mention. The intention is that you use JACK for pro audio apps; Pulse is built to work together with JACK in that situation. This is the design favoured by the Pulse folks, the JACK folks, and the app authors. They all feel that it makes the most sense to have different servers for the consumer audio and pro audio areas, as they have significantly different needs.

[markbuntu]

Well, I have Madriva One 2009 working on my machine with gnome and kde right out of the box.

Intrepid will not even boot on this machine so there is something to say about that.

[athaki]

Well, I have Madriva One 2009 working on my machine with gnome and kde right out of the box.

Intrepid will not even boot on this machine so there is something to say about that.

I concur if one distribution of linux works and one does not then use that one. I'm using ubuntu because I'm lazy and running out of cd-r's to try different OS. :popcorn:

[markbuntu]

Well, I still have a couple of Hardy distros on my machine, i386 and UbuntuStudio amd64 and they work just fine and are what I mostly use. I have 4 hard drives and that makes it fairly easy to try stuff out without causing problems.

I just thought I would give Mandria a whirl and see if it had the same problems I encountered with Intrepid since it is also using the 2.6.27 kernel and the new gnome and kde which I wanted to look at.

[Naiki Muliaina]

naiki: what do you find lacking about GNOME? I've always run GNOME, I don't particularly like KDE, and I have no feeling that there's anything lacking in our GNOME packages.

If you don't get an answer for something on the forum, it's because no-one there knows the answer. That's all. I don't think there's anything wrong with the MDV community at all, I think it's a great group of people.


It wasnt so much something lacking about Gnome. It was more with Mandriva, it just felt like a KDE distro. It felt like i should use KDE when using Mandriva. It just felt right! Hehe, thats not a bad thing! Its good that a distro can feel 'right' with its desktop enviroment.


On the community bit, i completely hear you. If nobody knows the awnser then nobody can help. That cant be changed without a bigger or more knowledgable community. That doesnt help my missus though when something goes wrong. As it goes scince moving to Mandriva 2009 shes had a few epic meltdowns through some minor things. Shes currently got a problem with her KDE login manager not working. Completely locked her out of her PC. Shes getting a little help but slowly and its not realy helping her.

Its one of them unfortunate things about Linux in general. Your often relying on forums for support. When a forum cant provide support and theres no documentation to help, your kinda screwed when things go wrong. Not Mandrivas fault, just a general fault with Linux in general. :)

[BigSilly]

Its one of them unfortunate things about Linux in general. Your often relying on forums for support. When a forum cant provide support and theres no documentation to help, your kinda screwed when things go wrong. Not Mandrivas fault, just a general fault with Linux in general. :)

I do agree with this. It's definitely one of the problems I have experienced for myself fairly recently. Sometimes, despite all best efforts, the forums can't always fix everything.

However I will add that I don't think it's necessarily a Linux only problem. Windows users are just as, if not more prevalent on the net posting on forums looking for help. They just don't all come on the Ubuntu ones! :biggrin:

[Naiki Muliaina]

Thats true about windows, but generaly if you google search a problem on windows you get a million results. Thats not a good thing is it? Heh. You know what i mean though.

[AdamWill]

You get a million results, many of which contradict each other, and 750,000 of which are links to spyware =)

I do understand what you mean, though. It is frustrating when you hit a problem and can't find a fix for it.

[wolfen69]

Well, I have Madriva One 2009 working on my machine with gnome and kde right out of the box.

Intrepid will not even boot on this machine so there is something to say about that.

i had the opposite experience. mandy2009 would not boot, but ubuntu is just fine. so there is something to say about that. :wink:

that being said, i thought 2008 spring was a masterpiece.

[rakris]

Ubuntu updates and upgrades are good. It even fixed my laptop sound problem in Intrepid (getting sounds from both internal and external speakers).

I had tried mandriva 2007. User-friendliness is ok, but a boring distro overall:D

[BigSilly]

Spring 2008 was indeed a fantastic OS. I don't think Mandiva 2009 is quite up to that standard, but I do still love it. I tried quite a few different distros recently, hoping to find one good enough to replace Mandy 2009 on my PC, and while Mint 5 KDE came close, I still ended up returning to Mandriva. I don't think 2009 is anywhere near as complete an experience as Spring 2008 was, but since I quite fancy KDE4 now I'm going to stick with it. I think so far Mandriva 2009 has the best implementation of KDE4 yet.

I do wish they'd ditch the EULA though. I just don't see the point of it.