user friendly confusion in the community?

allix · Post by **allix** » Sat May 05, 2007 3:18 am

JZA mentioned something interesting in the last show how a lot of users dismissed mandriva because its too user friendly yet use ubuntu.
I have the same question in regard to linespire/freespire, Mepis and xandros.

Its almost as if people have lost there faith

ubuntu comes along and strips them of there dignity

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat May 05, 2007 10:40 am

I don't know anyone who has "given up on" madriva or any of the rest for being user friendly. Generally the problems people have are personal prefs, and or perceived stability/over-stability issues in the distros. Personally, I have no problem with user friendly if it doesn't interfere with my ability to do what I want with my box.

Personally, though, I couldn't see myself using mandriva because I don't care for their package manager - the GUI or the cmd line. And like many others, I find their bizarre multi-tiered subscription plan very confusing.

I'm still looking around for a better laptop distro, though. I simply can't abide by kubuntu any longer, pclinuxos seems to be having some issues, and frankly doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that they are here to stay, as I've mentioned I don't really care for mandriva, etc. I may give frugalware another run on the lappy - I really have a soft spot in my heart for that distro, but jebus the fora are D-E-A-D.

allix · Post by **allix** » Sat May 05, 2007 11:33 am

Snarkout wrote: Generally the problems people have are personal prefs, and or perceived stability/over-stability issues in the distros.

hehe, FreeBSD 4.11 had a over-stability issue

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat May 05, 2007 3:09 pm

Snarkout wrote:I don't know anyone who has "given up on" madriva or any of the rest for being user friendly. Generally the problems people have are personal prefs, and or perceived stability/over-stability issues in the distros. Personally, I have no problem with user friendly if it doesn't interfere with my ability to do what I want with my box.

Personally, though, I couldn't see myself using mandriva because I don't care for their package manager - the GUI or the cmd line. And like many others, I find their bizarre multi-tiered subscription plan very confusing.

I'm still looking around for a better laptop distro, though. I simply can't abide by kubuntu any longer, pclinuxos seems to be having some issues, and frankly doesn't give me the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that they are here to stay, as I've mentioned I don't really care for mandriva, etc. I may give frugalware another run on the lappy - I really have a soft spot in my heart for that distro, but jebus the fora are D-E-A-D.

Debian... Debian...

I'm running Etch on my laptop, and it's a little aged, but it feels much more solid than Ubuntu Feisty.

Post by **dann** » Sun May 06, 2007 11:59 am

I must admit that I have never been a big fan of Mandrake and this is because of timing. I had started with red hat and vacilated between that and SuSE for some time when I finally said damnit, I'm gonna learn Linux and to do that I need Slackware.

I did give Mandrake a shot a few times but going from Slackware to Mandrake was far to limiting for one who wanted to do everything by hand. While I could appreciate what Drakeconf was attempting to do at the time, it got in my way. Thus, I was never partial to using Mandrake. To top it off, I continuously saw people trying to use mandrake on everything and failing.

Sure, it was a great distro for beginners to try out, but trying to get Mandrake running on a 486 with 32 megs of RAM and expecting the performance boost commonly associated with Linux was problematic, even 6 years ago. This was not the fault of Mandrake, but those who did not know better, and trying to convince them otherwise was a task.

For me, Mandrake/Mandriva was not much of a concern and I will admit I have had a tendency to dismiss what I figure is a damn good distro. A distro that has come a long way from what I hear.

Right now Ubuntu is the poster distro for Linux-for-the-masses. I like Ubuntu largely because it is Debian base. I also like it because I have come to appreciate not having to do everything by hand. Sure I enjoy a good slackware, arch or gentoo install; but it is also nice to just drop in and go without much fuss. So for me, Ubuntu has been a natural evolution. Slackware, Arch, gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu.

Will Mandriva ever achieve the spotlight position? Who knows. I guess what matters the most is what you like. Be it Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware or Linux From Scratch. Hell, it's all Linux. And while I may not prefer Mandriva, I would not hesitate for one second to use Mandriva over any other non-Linux Operating system any day of the week.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Thu May 10, 2007 8:32 am

I think the REAL problem with Mandrake was quality. They had a very buggy release or 2 (9 and 10) during a critical time of Linux growth. That turned a lot of people off, and the community hasn't forgiven them for it.

I'm convinced that these quality problems have been fixed, but by now Ubuntu has eaten their market share. If you want user friendly, use Ubuntu. If you want a more desktop oriented Red Hat based distro, use Fedora.

There's not much room in the current market for Mandriva, which is sad. It seems like a good distro, but I have no reason to switch.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu May 10, 2007 10:25 am

I should point out that I upgraded to feisty via adept for shits and grins - I'd finished my last presentation and could handle a little downtime. I honestly expected it to be a disaster like every other kubuntu upgrade I'd done. I was surprised when the only issue I ran into was that the upgrade manager bombed out at the end of the upgrade.

So far, while I still largely dislike a lot of the things the kubuntu devs are doing to KDE, feisty seems to have addressed several of the problems I've had with kubuntu. I'm still strongly against the *buntu philosophy of leaving known bugs in place until release+1 since that means that people are stuck with very annoying bugs for 6+ months in many cases. This isn't an ubuntu-specific problem by any means, though, this seems to be the current trend in the linux world, and frankly is one of the reasons I don't push linux more vocally.

This being said, not all is flowers and sunshine in the *buntu world - two different people I know have had major issues with feisty. One person completely blew up his box and couldn't even reinstall with either of the feisty isos - we ended up re-installing edgy. The other person has tried several installs, and so far has yet to even end up with an /etc/X11 folder we can TS xorg.conf in. Did they move X11 or something?

/warning - total tangent rant!!!/

Oh, and WTF is up with /etc/alternatives??? I realize that redhat is using this, too, now, but HOLY FSCK!!! This is the most convoluted piece of shit kludge I have ever had the great goddamned displeasure of having to work my way through. Whoever had this idea was a kook. Whoever saw this idea and rallied around it was even worse. Whoever decided it should become standard on linux distros should really reconsider breathing oxygen. Ok, maybe it's not that bad

- but seriously it's a very bad solution to what should be a simple issue to address. If, somehow, it's done to make devs lives easier at the expense of sys admins and linux users time and energy, it's plain backwards thinking, especially on pay-to-play distros. If it's done for any other reason, it shouldn't be.

/Ahhh, I haven't ranted like that for ages.../

elgordo123 · Post by **elgordo123** » Thu May 10, 2007 3:49 pm

I used to use Mandrake years ago when it was Mandrake. When Mandriva's first version came out it was really buggy and at the time felt very slow and bloated to me. I really didn't like getting caught in RPM hell, which would happen a lot especially because back then multimedia/video playback on linux was still pretty new. I switched to Fedora and had the same type of RPM problems but it didn't act as slow nor was as bloated with default installed software.
After I got into knoppmyth and playing with knoppix I really started to like Debian's way of doing things. I've been using Debian distro's (mainly kubuntu) ever since.

There are somethings in Ubuntu I dont like. /etc/alternatives was almost enough to make me want to find another distro. I too had to figure out the hard way why my installed programs (like java) weren't working right.
Unfortunately that is the price every distro has to pay to be accepted and to be "easier to use" and "more mainstream". Mandrake, Fedora, Ubuntu, they all end up doing these things. However they are very minor annoyances when compared with M$ or Apple.
Whenever you feel pissed at your distro, hop over and use windows (or add up how much Apple will cost you) for a few days or so. You'll find the grass isn't greener, they just painted it to make it look that way!

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Thu May 10, 2007 9:38 pm

Well, you all probably know my opinion.

I just finished doing an ftp install of Mandriva Spring on our Toshiba laptop. It took it an hour, but that was just because of the server's speed limits.

Checked off a couple of install option boxes, specified a root password and added a couple user accounts for me an my wife.

Right "out of the box", my widescreen LCD screen was identified and configured, I've got THREE selection in 3D desktop environments, I've got fully functional KDE and XFCE desktop managers (I could have had Gnome if I wanted it).

Oh, and I get an honest to goodness "root" account, too. I don't like sudo-this and sudo-that. I've got root and that's the way it should be.

Now, all I have to do is bring up the Mandriva Control Center, add a couple repository sources and my club commercial repository (for LinDVD) and just add a few more of my favourite apps and I'm done.

In my opinion, the only way this would have been easier is if I bought this laptop with Linux pre-installed. By installing via FTP, I didn't even have to download a single CD or DVD ISO (besides the 10MB boot.iso I had to burn to get the install process running).

Mandriva is the cat's meow.