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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: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday May 29 2015, @02:18AM
Amusingly I miss the UI from KDE2. I haven't used that DE in ages and I've caught a few glimpses of KDE3 and 4 so I have some idea of how it's changed over the years.
I wonder sometimes if Ubuntu and Mint provide the same experience to newcomers to Linux as Mandrake had done for me.
I think Mandrake 10.0 used KDE3. It was a very nice DE, I sometimes still think it was the pinnacle of Linux DE's. It had more polish than Gnome, but still was at a simple enough level to not be distracting. IMHO it was the perfect desktop for someone switching from Windows to Linux. Similar enough to be intuitive, yet with the feeling you were suddenly doing things a better way. I'm using Kubuntu now with KDE4, and while I can see where the extra bells and whistles might be useful in certain work environments, they are not necessary and are kind of too much for a general use PC.