mandriva as a distro - going south?

[cp0ff]

in the last year or so, I have had a tremendous amount of trouble with mandriva.

I have used mandrake/mandriva exclusively since 8.0 and never have I had as many
glitchy issues as I have in the past year-ish.

from looking at some of the posts here for 2010, it does not look promising.

many programs or sites that had mandriva RPMs as a option, or mentioned mandriva
no longer do (skype for one)
and I have noticed that the amount of users on this forum has dropped while others have gone up.

I know they went through some kind of changes at the company,

but can someone else shine some light on this for me.

thanks!


using
2009.1
on IBM thinkpad

[nmset]

My experience with Mandriva is rather excellent since I started using it 10 years back. It's a small company and has much fewer sales force and investment power than billion dollar backed companies like Ubuntu and Red Hat. Why do you think MS still has so much success ? It's not the best in any category ! More or less same reasoning for MySQL. It's just a question of financial power behind.

I have always been puzzled while reading sometimes very hard critics on that distro. I also tried Red Hat in the early 200x, Ubuntu recently, I'm not ready to switch to something else.

It could be that Mandiva disappear some day, no money - no business, users like me would certainly switch to a RPM based distro. Until then, I'll keep on with it.

[cp0ff]

is ubuntu not rpm-based?

if it was not for mandrake, I would not have been so
blissfully and entirely windows free for this long...

and a bad linux distro is better than any win IMO,

just trying to figure out if such sentiments are shared,
or if I hit some freak spell of bad luck.

[nmset]

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, .deb packages.

[ongte]

There's no doubt that Mandriva's popularity has declined sharply since it's heyday in the late 90s. Mandrake as a company had a lot of trouble & almost went bankrupt. But since then it has bounced back releasing the excellent Mandriva 2008.1.

Of course, by this time Ubuntu was already the new king of the hill. Since then Mandriva has started to climb again in popularity. 4 years ago, it completely dropped out of distrowatch top 10. But now it's back in the top 5 & gaining. So I rather doubt that it will die anytime soon. But it will all depend on Mandriva the company & also the strength of the community.

Mandriva the company has made many mistakes. Such as laying off Adam Williamson, their excellent community manager. Controversial things like firing Mandrake founder Gaël Duval. Hopefully they will learn.

Although Mandriva lost a lot of ground in the English speaking world, it actually gained a following in places like Italy, Poland, Turkey, Brazil and in Asia.

I've been using Mandriva since Mandrake 7.2. MCC is probably the only reason I still stick with it. Until Kubuntu has a control center or Yast becomes sane, I'll be running Mandriva.

[gerard4143]

I've been using Mandriva for the last couple of years and I have to say, for me its the best Linux solution.
That said I was surprised at how buggy the 2010.0 release was but giving a few weeks of updates most of the bugs were fixed(new release jitters) and now I find Mandriva 2010/Gnome very stable.

[reed9]

I ran Mandriva for a while with 2008.1. It was pretty good, but I really dislike their package management. It was incredibly slow compared to APT, the command lines options were not as clear or easy for me compared to other distros, as I recall I had no end of trouble with the automatic updater running in the background, crashing, locking me out of the package manager. Package management was the biggest reason I left Mandriva.

When 2009 came out, they promised performance improvements to the package manager. I tried it and still thought it was awkward and slow. Also, I really hated the default artwork and splash screen. By this point I had already found Arch, so it wasn't a serious contender, I just wanted to see how it was coming along.

In summary, I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the package manager, and I have found the documentation to be sub-par.

[daark.child]

Mandriva 2010 got a lot of good reviews (some rated it better then Ubuntu), so I guess they are slowly getting their act back together. As for documentation, I think their documentation site has lots of good resources for newbies as well as advanced users.

[elija]

Linux Format magazine called Mandriva 2010 the best Mandriva for a long time, perhaps ever. I don't always agree with them though (they lurve Fedora)