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 Wednesday May 27 2015, @05:18PM
I think it was 2004. I sent to one of those websites for a bunch of Linux install discs. Tried to install Debian, failed. Note that my install method was simply to say yes to whatever was asked. The first one that installed correctly was Mandrake 10.0 and I used it for several years until I became a beta tester for Ubuntu at work. I then switched to Ubuntu at home. Sad to see Mandriva (originally Mandrake) go, it was a good distro when I used it.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:01PM
Similar to my experience. I'd been trying unsuccessfully to learn Linux since about 2000, found Mandrake in (I think) 2002. I switched to kubuntu several years ago when it was rumored that Mandriva was dying.
It's a sad day.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:06PM
I was with Mandrake/Mandriva when Texstar was doing a 3rd party repo for multimedia stuff that wasn't included on the main distro, I moved to PClinuxOS before Mandrake became Mandriva and went to a subscription base.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:15PM
Not my first experience, and never spent much time playing with any version of Mandrake.
I first found some version of Red Hat, then SuSE.
I was astounded to find Red Hat (and most of its clones like Mandrake) installed wide open, very insecure, lots of services running.
Suse installed all locked down.
I've been something of a SuSE/OpenSuse fanboy ever since. Looked at Mandriva once, ubuntu a few times, Slack, OpenBSD, etc.
But never went back to anything Red Hat(ish) or had any reason to look into a subscription version of linux.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:55PM
never went back to anything Red Hat(ish)
Remind us again what packaging method *SuSE uses. ;-)
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by Placenta on Wednesday May 27 2015, @10:04PM
What's your point?
The package management system in use is independent from what software is installed and how it's configured.
Just using RPM doesn't make a distro Red Hat-like.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday May 27 2015, @10:57PM
I remember learning that the hard way by trying to mix and match RedHat and Mandrake RPMs (and the occasional SUSE package and one other distro I'm not remembering). I got myself into a bunch of weird dependency situations, lots of linking problems, and the occasional mystery bug.
After that, I think I did Slackware for a short bit and then went down the Linux from Scratch rabbit hole, which really educated me as to why I was running into the problems I was running into while mixing and matching those RPMs.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:11PM
And SuSE (like Mandrake) was more than a little "Red Hat(ish)". They're different now, but RH has diverged from SuSE as much as the other way around.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday May 28 2015, @02:58AM
Not my first experience, and never spent much time playing with any version of Mandrake.
I first found some version of Red Hat, then SuSE.
I was astounded to find Red Hat (and most of its clones like Mandrake) installed wide open, very insecure, lots of services running.
My experience is similar, except I went from RedHat to Debian in '99 or 2000. So, not only was Redhat ridiculously insecure at the time, but it was also neck-deep in RPM hell. The dependency problems are what made me look for alternatives, and by comparison, Debian's apt was a beautiful thing -- even though at the time aptitude and the like weren't available yet, so package management was done largely with dselect.
I still tried different distros over the years, but never Mandrake/Mandriva or any other RPM-based distro. I remember people saying it was nice, but RPM hell left me bitter and unwilling to use RPM-based distros. I hear the situation's greatly improved (how could it not be?) but I still avoid the Redhat-derived distros, preferring to stick to the Debian-derived side, occasionally dabbling in something non-Debian, like SUSE.
I'm sure the fans of the redhat-offspring distros like Mandriva have their reasons for liking them, but I haven't seen a point.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:18AM
RPM hell was largely the result of people trying to do things AROUND rpm, instead of with it, or as someone above posted, grabbing random RPMs from around the net and assuming that since the both had an extension of .rpm, one was free to substitute any vaguely similar rpm from any random distro, regardless of numerical version numbers, or trying to update in place piecemeal.
Everybody was naive and reckless back the, and most people who hozed their install did it by themselves. I did it to myself a couple times.
That said, dependency control is a lot better with all distros these days. Rare is the occasion where a dependency issue isn't met when any new packages is released.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:16AM
RPM hell was largely the result of people trying to do things AROUND rpm, instead of with it, or as someone above posted, grabbing random RPMs from around the net and assuming that since the both had an extension of .rpm, one was free to substitute any vaguely similar rpm from any random distro, regardless of numerical version numbers, or trying to update in place piecemeal.
Largely but not entirely. Redhat got hosed a couple times in the RH4-5 era for me just by installing packages provided by RH itself. It didn't happen often but it didn't have to -- just once was enough to completely fucking ruin everything. It was sort of like playing russian roulette with your package manager, which wasn't fun.
Everybody was naive and reckless back the, and most people who hozed their install did it by themselves. I did it to myself a couple times.
Done my share of distro trashing (and reinstalling) over the years too, but I have enough sense not to blame the distro for it, so I wasn't including any of that. I don't get mad when RH or Debian or any other distro breaks from my own doing, and I have some tolerance for breakage when I use a release I know is prone to it, like Debian's testing repo. It's something else entirely to get a "stable" release and end up with a trashed system because I happened to install the wrong thing, which is what used to happen.
That said, dependency control is a lot better with all distros these days. Rare is the occasion where a dependency issue isn't met when any new packages is released.
Definitely true, especially with Debian. Dependency resolution is generally excellent, which is one of the reasons I started using it in the first place. Hell, it's good enough now that I can run testing on my desktop, cherry-pick packages from unstable and experimental, and on top of that install a handful of libs and miscellaneous software from Ubuntu PPAs (my system is an abomination at this point, I know) and it manages the dependencies beautifully.
Package management has come a long way since the RPM hell days. It had to, though, to keep up with the growing complexity of the distros.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday May 29 2015, @02:01AM
I was astounded to find Red Hat (and most of its clones like Mandrake) installed wide open, very insecure, lots of services running.
Fortunately Mandrake at least had an easy to understand and use GUI for shutting off unnecessary services. I discovered it almost immediately and shut down whatever I was not planning to use, which was pretty much everything.
(Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Thursday May 28 2015, @02:00AM
I wonder sometimes if Ubuntu and Mint provide the same experience to newcomers to Linux as Mandrake had done for me.
(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.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:06PM
The first of many, unfortunately. The pestilence cannot be stopped, it appears.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:39PM
Ignoring the fact no mention of this is made in TFA, what is System D and why do people get so worked up over it?
Not used Linux in a while myself.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @07:31PM
http://systemdsucks.com [systemdsucks.com]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:37PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:39PM
You best learn a little bit about what systemd is and what it is doing to the linux landscape.
Even if you don't use linux, the moral of the story is important to know for how this behavior is infecting everything we do here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:18PM
Wait a minute, systemd is supposed to make businesses flourish on linux support, when all you needed before was to RTFM. An unneeded intermediary between kernel and userland bloating up with new functions, arbitrary defaults and a tendency not to care when breaking stuff cries PAID SUPPORT as nothing else.
Their error was to start too early.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday May 27 2015, @10:56PM
You mean they have adopted the Oracle business model?
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Celestial on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:31PM
R.I.P. Mandriva, long live Mageia. Mandriva has essentially been dead for the past few years. Most of the Mandrake/Mandriva developers forked their own distro Mageia [mageia.org] a couple of years ago, and it's been steadily improving since. The fifth version is expected "soon."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:58PM
I don't follow RH-based stuff too closely, so correct me if my memory is off.
After the corporation bought up Mandrake, they diverted a not-insignificant portion of the earnings to "educational" pursuits--and away from the core business.
The Linux efforts and the brand suffered because of that.
...and here we are with another defunct distro.
...or am I simplifying too much?
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday May 27 2015, @11:15PM
From what i remember, they started giving the finger to the community, releasing bad releases, screwing it all up basically.
When the community turned away, they wondered why...
...i still miss Corel linux, lol. First distro i tried that i thought was amazing.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:03PM
Interesting, thanks. Mandrake was one of only two distros (the other being Puppy) that I've liked well enough to keep for very long. I'll have to give Magaia a try.... do they have screenshots anywhere? I don't see any on their site.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:41PM
Up through version 9.3, Mandrake/Mandriva essentially owned the desktop Linux user space. It had built incredible momentum in user friendliness and power. The powers that be at my workplace, an all-Windows shop at the time, had given it a serious look as a desktop replacement for Windows, and were seriously impressed with it. It's one fatal flaw, though, was an inability to work reliably with SMB through Konqueror.
Then version 10 came along, and so many previously working things broke that I couldn't get my work done anymore. At that point, a coworker introduced me to Ubuntu, then I quickly found Kubuntu.
While Kubuntu had rough edges, it was just as easy to use as Mandrake. And it had working SMB within Konqueror. At that point, I had pushed Mandrake out of my mind.
But the thing that really made Kubuntu shine was access to the Debian repositories. About 75%+ of all the software I stumbled across on the Web during my Mandrake years was unavailable in the Mandrake repositories. Kubuntu, on the other hand, made it extremely rare to not find what I wanted in the repositories. RPM repositories are spartan compared to Debian repositories.
I mark Mandrive 10 as the point where the distribution suffered a fatal stroke, and was existing solely on life support.
(Score: 2) by skater on Wednesday May 27 2015, @06:56PM
I played with Mandrake once or twice, but I mostly used it for the partitioning manager. It really was a lot better than the console-based one that came with my distro of choice (Slackware), which was useful in the more complex situations. The submitter is right about that part of it, at least.
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Wednesday May 27 2015, @07:38PM
Even Kbuntu is having issues
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/05/kubuntu-project-lead-asked-to-step-down-by-ubuntu-community-council [omgubuntu.co.uk]
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @07:53PM
Kubuntu is set to use system D in its next release. Grab your ankles, KDE people!
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:42PM
Kde has already said it will depend on systemd in around six months, this was back in March I believe so they have already grabbed their ankles...
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 1) by stormreaver on Thursday May 28 2015, @01:26PM
...this was back in March I believe so they have already grabbed their ankles...
I don't understand the allusion. Given the prevalent irrational hatred of systemd, though, I'll presume it wasn't intended to be flattering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:23PM
To grab your ankles you have to bend over. Ok, you could bend you knees and crouch/squat, but we'll assume bending over in this case. The implication here is that you are bending over to prepare to be fucked up the arse.
(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