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It seems that a great Linux distribution has now been laid to rest. Mandrivia closed its doors today. It is a sad day for me personally as it was one of the first proper user friendly distributions, taking Red Hat's RPM's and building upon them for desktop use there was nothing close at the time. Their Graphical installer was stuff of legends when poor Windows and other Linux distributions were still on console installs, Their Partitioning application had no peers, the Windows equivalent was Partition Magic and it wasn't fit to lick Diskdrake' boots. Okay that's just a personal opinion.
Anyway with great sadness here is the TFA
http://uk.businessinsider.com/mandriva-goes-out-of-business-2015-5?r=US
For decades, Mandriva has been trying to take on Microsoft Windows with a Linux version of a desktop PC. Its claim to fame was a deal in 2007 with the Nigerian government in which it beat out Microsoft to put its flavor of Linux on 17,000 PCs used by Nigerian schoolchildren. It also had some success in Malaysia. But by 2012, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, a situation that had happened several times since its early days, in 1998.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by morgauxo on Thursday May 28 2015, @02:44PM
1998 was the year of the Linux Desktop.. at least it was for me anyway.
Mandrake might as well have been my first Linux distro. Technically I started with RedHat from some install discs that came in the back of a book. Soon after though Mandrake came out and it was Mandrake that convinced me to use Linux as a desktop, not just a server. Mandrake had all the applications I needed at the time Netscape (browser plus pop/smtp email), tik/tok (AIM), licq (ICQ), x11amp (mp3 player). I know it had some sort of document writer, I think maybe it was StarOffice (ancestor to libreoffice). That combo included pretty much everything I needed... well that and a C compiler for school work.
Mandrake also came with Supermount by default. I know that kernel developers considered Supermount to be an ineligant hack but floppies still mattered back then. Having to go to the commandline and mount/unmount a floppy was almost embarassing if a Windows user saw me do it. With supermount you just insert the floppy and start using it. Eject it when done. That's just like every PC user had come to expect since at least the days of MS-DOS. It's still hard to get that kind of removable disc convenience if you aren't running a big heavy desktop environment or if your big heavy desktop environment is one you installed yourself, not the distro default.
Back then most people were still on dialup but I was in college and had access to the campus network via ethernet. My main computer of course did have a CD-ROM drive but those were still too expensive for me to put one in secondary, project computers. Besides, hardly anyone (myself included) had a CD Writer yet. Who wanted to mail-order install CDs? Being able to use the single-floppy network-install seemed almost like magic. My university had close network ties with a neighboring one where there happened to be a mirror for Mandrake's FTP server. Those installs were lightning fast for the time!
This was all a long time ago and I haven't used Mandrake or Mandriva in many years. It is still sad to see them gone though. I'm almost tempted to fire up a VM and install some ancient version just for old times sake. I wonder how hard it would be to find one...
(Score: 1) by esperto123 on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:52PM
Ditto