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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 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.