Linux is not ready for the desktop - Mandriva devs

Question

I just read this in the latest DistroWatch Weekly:
You wouldn't expect something like this to happen at any time, let alone on the eve of Mandriva Linux 2007 release. Last week, two Mandriva developers went on record saying that "Linux is not ready for the desktop". In a web log post entitled Why I'll never use Linux for my main desktop, Vincent Danen concluded: "This kind of thing is precisely why, for me, Linux belongs on the server. Now if those kernel-developing idiots would get their act together and give us a 2.6 kernel that was a) stable and b) supported for more than a week, then I'd really be pleased." Another Mandriva developer, Fabrice Facorat, agreed. In a post called Linux ready for Desktop? Of course not!, he had this to say: "For me when you have control over the environment and the hardware, Linux is ready: think servers, workstations, thin clients, kiosks. However when you have no control on the hardware, Linux is not ready because it somewhat lacks flexibility."
There you have it, right from the horse's mouth! From two guys who have been working for a Linux company, developing a popular desktop Linux distribution, for years! Yes, that's right, Mandriva Linux is not ready for your desktop! Don't waste your money buying it!
One really has to wonder about the future of a company which happily asks Gaël Duval to leave, yet is quite pleased to keep developers who publicly hint that they consider Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox and other kernel developers "idiots"! A perfect pre-release PR, non?
No comments... I just cannot find any words.  :shock:   :?

Answer 1

ughhhh. Mandrake have always sucked at marketing, they do themselves no favours. IMHO, they're becoming more and more irrelevant with each release. Once upon a time I might have reccomended mandrake to a newbie, but certainly not now. They've got great assets and a good base. The *potential* to become a good distro. But each release, stupid bugs make it through, and the improvements seem negligable.
Once of their better features is their huge repository of packages -- which is horrendously poorly advertised. You'll find nowhere in the GUI's or desktop a place to access their 'contrib' repo which is the equivalent of our extra, and contains a huge amount of packages. Also an important point for mandriva has been mandrakeusers.org/mandrivausers.org, which has been a huge community offering great support for newbies to mandrake, rather than directing them into the expensive mess that is known as the mandriva club. Mandriva have totally ignored this resource, and have made no attempt to support this board, upon which you'll find, I have quite a reasonable post count from back in my early days of Linux (mandriva 8.2 was first distro), and continuing on to now. It also exemplifies their (lack of) decent customer support.
The distro has had countless irritating bugs which pervaded through releases, and all sorts of utterly stupid ones that should never have made it through the testing process. They do little to help themselves with this. I've reported countless bugs, and all of them have been ignored for months. On their last release, they included the old rt2500 module, which at the time, hard locked SMP machines, and made my mandriva unbootable as it was loaded on boot. I filed a bug, marked it as high priority and it was utterly ignored for more than 6 months, so much so I had forgotten about it. Other bugs and emails have suffered a similar fate.
It's GUI tools, have become a complete mess, for example wireless, in 2006 release, was absolutely horrendous to configure, and had no support for WPA -- wpa_supplicant wasnt even on the CD's so people could configure it manually.
It's good to see they're finally ditching their old desktop theme, which they dragged on for far too long. It's always been absolutely hideous.
Their business model emphasises the 'club' far too much, making it difficult to even find a download on their site for the standard version, which has "Free" tacked all over it, as if to try and make you feel like a cheapskate. Doesnt help how they change their release cycle frequently either.
The stupidity of Mandriva just confounds me. PR like this does nothing to help them. They criticise the developers for not providing a 2.6 kernel that is stable. Maybe mandriva should look in their own backyard, and offer a distro that's remotely stable. Last time I used it, it had a horrendously old udev, hotplug, and a very slow hardware detection system. It still used bootsplash, which has been unmaintained for over two years, and included supermount, which Con Kolivas has disowned and again, has abandoned for years. They're hardly doing themselves favours patching their kernels with this out of date crap. Nor do they update them, I dont see mandriva offering updates to newer ones, which would no doubt fix many of the reported issues.
Alternatively they could do what other distros do and pitch in and help. Many of the kernel developers are also employees of other vendors, or have an important part in other distros, such as Daniel Drake and Robert Love. It'd be great for mandrake if they employed a kernel developer, because it's clear THEY are the ones who are the idiots.
I have no idea how they made it out of their bankrupcy, with the lacklustre state of their miserable distro, I think their days are numbered, unless they do something to change around their image and fix their product.
ok, im done.
James