A Quick Look at Mandriva 2011

[Rob Williams]

We're in the off-season for big distro releases, but that hasn't stopped Mandriva from releasing one of its most interesting variants to date. In a bold move to an exclusive KDE desktop, Mandriva 2011 looks to simplify its development and give people a straight-forward and highly polished offering. Let's check it out.

Check out our quick look at Mandriva Linux 2011 and discuss it here!

[marfig]

It was my first distro way back in the late 90s when I first started to dabble with Linux (it would take me nearly 10 more years and the threat Vista posed to me continuing using Microsoft OS, to finally get on with the program on Linux). It was called Mandrake then. I fine distro and one of the first to offer a graphical installation. It's an interesting thing to see they never moved from KDE in all these years.

[...] along with a move to RPM5 (I admit I am not sure of the singificance of this).

Basically, and to my knowledge, it's backwards compatible with RPM 4, but not with RPM 3 and below, whereas the official release is backwards compatible with 3. Also, if you use RPM 5 to pack with LZMA or xar, RPM won't be able to use these.

It's essentially a mess. For the sake of a new port because someone thought they could do better (but didn't really), you introduce yet another variable into the Linux ecosystem which, frankly has to many package managers for comfort. One of the problems non technical users face when trying to install software if they don't know how to just build from source and avoid package managers entirely, is exactly that often the software they wish to install isn't available in their distro usual format. One can always work around this, of course. But usually by learning how to compile software or how to use 200 different package managers. Not funny.

Anyways. That's my only criticism. I did appreciate Mandriva brought something new to the table by taking the bold move of greatly customizing KDE. They can't be accused of being just another distro.

[Greg King]

I love the write up Rob. I tried Mandriva 2011 out for a few days last week when it was released but was not moved enough to switch from openSUSE. I know I'm still a noob when it comes to Linux but I felt more comfortable in openSUSE.

The polish is there and should be appreciated. I like that they did something with KDE, as marfig stated, but it wasn't for me. Im sure it would get used to it with time but it wasn't fluid enough to justify switching distros.

Good read man.

I hate ROSA as I hate GNOME 3 or Unity! It's just a useless crap to me. And Nepomuk is one of the first things I stop in KDE, I never use it. No need for this stuff. OK you can change the panel but then this means the Mandriva defaults are bad and add some minutes to customization... Could we have a distro with sane defaults please? E.g. the Mageia defaults are much better. Also, I don't like stuff as systemd, although Fedora also uses it.

It has also some issues about security as shown in this review: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/09/01...p-2011-review/

Mandriva 2011 is not a bad release but it has lots of little flaws more or less annoying and Mageia 1 is more stable. And this "only KDE" model is, err, hmm...

By the way, Mandriva is almost dead, right? I'm not sure it will be there for much time yet. Almost the whole team left the boat, now with Mageia. As said in a comment in the review linked above:

"With Mageia’s rise in popularity, I dont see Mandriva lasting much longer." We'll see but for me Mageia is much better.

[MacMan]

This looks interesting, but I'm still having so much trouble with my other Linux distros I think I'll just advoid this one, at least for awhile. I am, after all, a curious type of fellow.

My old mandriva, installed in jan 2011 couldn't format a Seagate green 2TB drive. It required Windows 7 or special Linux kung-fu skills to use. does this distro now format those drives as seemlessly as Linux used to format legacy drives?

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

My old mandriva, installed in jan 2011 couldn't format a Seagate green 2TB drive. It required Windows 7 or special Linux kung-fu skills to use. does this distro now format those drives as seemlessly as Linux used to format legacy drives?

Hmm, that's a little bizarre. I can't say that I've tried to format a drive that large from the installer, but I've used Gparted for them just fine (I boot up with Ubuntu to do that, before installation, for whatever reason).

That aside, at this point I consider Mandriva a distro to avoid, because its future is so uncertain. A better alternative at the moment is Mageia, a distro based on Mandriva, and so good that Mandriva itself is planning to rebuild the distro using it (talk about an odd happening).

http://www.mageia.org/en/