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Nov
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Editorial: Thoughts on Mandriva’s Future
Filed Under Editorial, Mandriva, free software, internets, linux, plf
Mandriva 2007 may be the best distribution I have used. XGL/AIGLX worked for me right out of the box. My windows wobbled, things were transparent and I got to spin the cube. The updated look of Mandriva One is fresh. I was able to install anything I needed. Looking through Mandriva’s forum, you see employees of the company who care and are genuinely trying to help. Mandriva offers "free as in freedom" versions and versions with propriatery software–meaning Nvidia drivers are set up, MP3’s play and you can watch DVDs. You would expect a release like this to be trumpeted. Instead, the release was met with hostility. Forums on tech sites were filled with Linux users cheering for the end of Mandriva. What happened? How did a company that was loved at one time become so unpopular? Is the hostility justified?
I think a starting point for these bad feelings began with the advent of the Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Club in late 2001. Mandriva needed a revenue source, so the club began and seemingly transformed Mandriva into a subscription based model service. Some of the benefits included propriatery software being available for download. Club members got an exclusive download mirror list and full access to commercial applications. They got the newest releases a few weeks before everyone else.
The biggest disaster here was the delay in getting the new release for non members. Most distro junkies are very enthusiastic about trying the latest and greatest. It is sad, but there are plenty of us that follow release schedules and excitedly jump on an announced new release. We aren’t overly committed to one distribution. It is interesting to see the improvements made, find the mistakes and compare it to similar distros. We may have loved Mandrake, but didn’t love it enough to commit to the club. Mandrake was having trouble at the time. I was a member, got early access, and couldn’t install Mandrake 10. The installer kept freezing due to problems with my motherboard. I left Mandrake and the club, never to look back. It may not make sense, but by the time a new release was available to the public, I didn’t care. I was irritated at being made to wait a month and it just didn’t seem new a month later. Other distributions didn’t make me do that. The delay made Mandriva less appealing.
I also had a sense that my non-club install would be crippled. If I wanted propriatery drivers or non-free codecs I had to join the club. I was wrong about this, but didn’t know it. The message a lot of us got was Mandriva only cared about you if you paid. We moved on. PCLinuxOS came along. Ubuntu showed up. Mandriva became irrelevant to a lot of its former users. Then Gael Duval was laid off. This made the community crazy. Mr. Duval founded Mandrake in 1998. The CEO, François Bancilhon, painted it as a painful business decision. Gael claimed he was fired, and announced he was suing the company. Was it a good decision? There really is no way to answer that. From a PR perspective, it was terrible. It looked like big, greedy Mandriva got arrogantly corporate and decided to attack the hero of the people, Gael. In real life, things are rarely so cut and dried. I have read a few interviews with Mr. Bancilhon. He seems like a genuinely funny and good natured man. I have read postings by Mr. Duval and he comes off as likable. I, and I guess most of you, have no idea what the pressures are in running a publicly traded Linux company. I can only comment on how it played out on "the internets".
If things weren’t bad enough, on the eve of Mandriva 2007’s release Distrowatch attacked! Distrowatch Weekly portrayed a personal blog entry by Vincent Danen as a public relations statement from Mandriva. They quoted Danen calling kernel developers "idiots". The headline of the blog was "Why I would never use Linux for my main desktop." Dannen’s response is here. As you can guess, the comment section was filled with glee at the coming death of Mandriva. Long live Ubuntu! Woohoo! It is a shame that we are at this point.
My experience with Mandriva 2007 has been very positive. I installed Mandriva One, a live cd with an installer that is similar to another famous distribution. Using PLF in addition to Mandriva’s repos, I was able to get all the packages I wanted. The 3D desktop works without problem. It is an outstanding distribution, easily Mandriva’s best in years. It is better than the lastest Ubuntu, which I have been running as well. 2007 doesn’t seem to be gaining much traction in the community. I see fifty reviews of Edgy, fifty of Fedora, barely any for Mandriva. It is too bad, because the company took a big step forward by releasing Mandriva One and Mandriva Free to everyone on the release date. It was a great and courageous decision on their part. It was a very nice first step to repairing some of the damage done.
Click here for Free Information Technology Resources!Here is where they should go now, in my humble opinion: Simplify club membership. The levels are confusing. The breakdown of the club levels does not show much of an advantage to joining as a Silver or Gold member. There is a mention of a free, reduced benefit Aluminum membership, but I can’t find how to sign up for it. There is mention of VIP membership, but no details other than it is free for exceptional contributors. Why not make VIP memberships available to testers that file a certain number of bug reports, or people who contribute a certain amount of documentation? This would create much good will. Renaming the levels might be helpful… something like Basic, Home and Ultimate? 
Move away from using software as the selling point of the club. People aren’t going to pay for something they can get for free from other distros. They will just switch to those distros. I would offer free two month memberships with no strings attached, so people can see what the club is about, get used to it and then decide to keep it. Giving these away shows confidence in the club. Divorce using the club from using the distro. Make sure people understand that they aren’t at a disadvantage if they are not members. Fear will not bring in new members. Providing services like eTraining and the ability to have a fancier forum identity page will bring them in. If the club is so great, show me so I can decide that I need it. Don’t use it to deny my software like Nvidia or wireless drivers. Take advantage of Vista. When Vista is released, there is going to be a huge opportunity to get people using Mandriva. Once the restrictions inherent in Vista, like the two install limit per license limit or the barring of running it in a virtual machine, become apparent, people will want to see the alternatives. Mandriva One is a great way to demonstrate how well Linux works. Get it in people’s faces. Capitalize on Ubuntu’s stumble. There is a fair amount of unhappiness and disappointment with Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy). Promote your ease of use. Promote a free two month club membership. Do something to get Mandriva’s name on the big tech sites pages. Promote Mandriva’s history. Let everyone know about your outstanding commitment to free software.
Simplify Mandriva.com. The website is a mess. There are seemingly fourteen million different links on the main page. If you go to the site looking for anything, it is too complicated to find. Break the page up a bit. Each section goes to five different products for each class of user (business, individuals, partners and community). Get an honest critique of the site and redo it. Use Oracle’s attack on Red Hat to your advantage. Price your support lower than Oracle’s, if possible. Show why you are a leader and a wise choice. For god’s sake, fix the spelling errors on your business page. You cannot expect a business to invest in your product if you cannot use proper grammar and spelling when you promote it. It gives off the impression that you are more focused on French business and aren’t serious about the United States.
Get your people talking to the press. I have only very recently discovered the outstanding employees that Mandriva has. Adam Williamson can be seen on different forums (and a lot in Mandriva’s forums) representing the company in a very positive way. His communications are thoughtful and honest. His comments in the Distrowatch Weekly comment section went a long way toward cooling a bad situation down. Vincent Danen shows that he cares, even if his blog was controversial. Warly is very helpful in the Mandriva forums. I thought this interview did a great job of showing the talent Mandriva has. You need these people to be seen, to show the human face of your company. It also lets us know that you have not given up on North America and only care about the European and South American markets.
I planned this editorial a month ago and intended to voice my displeasure with Mandriva. It amazes me how quickly things can change. I was blown away by Mandriva One, impressed with the company’s decision to release 2007 to the full community. I have watched the staff handle a difficult situation with grace and honesty. I have come full circle and now am rooting for Mandriva. My meme for the next year will be "Mandriva is the next Ubuntu". I predict that by this time next year, Mandriva will be the trendy distribution. We Linux users are a fickle bunch, but only need to be shown that the companies we support care about this (and us) as much as we do. I believe Mandriva will be doing a lot repair work over the next year. Watch out Red Hat and Ubuntu. There is a company tanned, rested and ready. I wish them luck.
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Comments
23 Responses to “Editorial: Thoughts on Mandriva’s Future”
May be you are right. And you seems to be, but in my opinion if you compare the core of Mandriva/Red Hat/Suse and the core of Debian/Ubuntu, which is the package management system, RPM vs DEB, you will see that this is what make debian and ubuntu wins in the final.
I must be too quick to make a conclusion, but I feel that as a long term Mandriva (mandrake at that time) user. I started using linux with Mandriva so I thanks them for everything they have done for me in the past. But today I do not use it anymore.
And sometimes I look at what made me switch to another distribution. Let me tell you everything, the most critical first.
1) The randomly behavior of the configuration utilities. I mean every single piece that makes mandriva what it is. They are command tools, wizards, Mandriva Control Center (MCC), .. everything created by the programmers from Mandriva and which is build for the end users.
An example: the rescue mode of the live cd. There are many usefull tools in it, like “restoring the Lilo” (I don’t know if they fully switched to grub now anyway). But this tool will not work 50% of the time. Why ? I don’t know, they made it!
Note: that is from a real experience.
2) Breaking a whole distribution by installing one package. Take perl as an example. When they switched to x.5.6 or I don’t remember exactly, there was a non compatible api breakage between x.5.6 and x.5.7 of Perl. So when you would like to install the new MCC the 5.7 was needed, but it failed to update everything depending on perl. And urpmi breaks from the upgrade, leaving me unable to update anything else. I will not even talk about the upgrade from one version of the distribution to a newer… this is a mess. You won’t survive an upgrade. Everytime I did have a new version, I tried to upgrade anyway, but the result was an unusable distribution. You are practically forced to do a fresh installation. So keep an /home directory, and you will be safe.
3) Incompatible behavior between MCC configuration utilities and manually editing files. I mean I never succeed in making my networking work without the Mandriva network wizard.
Imagine you have your network card that is not working. Have a look at the configuration file before and after the wizard, there is no change at all.. What is done with this MCC ? I never found anywhere.
_________
Conclusion: I think they should stay away from perl-gtk and maybe start to build command line tools. When those would be “stable”, then they can create a rock solid GUI binded to it. Like Synaptic did with apt-get.
Note: I never found an equivalent to urpmi command as the GUI. Their Drake RPM was so bad at being usable. I mean you take 10 minutes to select which packages you want to install, by “checking” the box next to it. Then you “apply”. And if it fails for some reason (and it will), everything is back to “not-checked”. You have to spend 10 minutes again in searching between 2420 packages… common!
And you have the reason why I switched and I’m not coming back. Anyway I hope to someday, if they do some changes they will never make.
PS: I made a review two or three weeks ago. I did it to explain at everyone, even the linux “non-initiate” people how to download and use it. Here it is.
http://www.cmsoft.net/linux-ultimate/mandriva/2007/
Have fune with your Linux, whatever it is.
gianni, we’ve never done a major perl version upgrade for a stable release, so I can only conclude that you tried to update MCC from Cooker on a stable release (or tried to install a version from a newer stable release on an older stable release). This isn’t supported, we’ve never said it’s supported or recommended that anyone do it, and it will break your system. This isn’t something it’s easy to fix or that we would consider worth fixing, because we don’t suggest, promote or in any other way encourage using Cooker packages on a stable distro.
drakconnect changes the following files, AFAIK:
/etc/sysconfig/network
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-*
/etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/wireless.d/*
you can make manual changes to the network configuration in those files and they will be respected. The one with most of the settings in it is /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg- , so ifcfg-eth0 or ifcfg-wlan0 or whatever.
Most of the configuration tools are not ‘natively’ GUI tools. Actually, you’ll notice you can run almost all the MDV configuration tools at a console. The perl-GTK GUI interface is run if you run the tool in an environment where X is available, otherwise the console (curses) version is run. Try it - go to a console with ctrl-alt-F1 and run drakconnect or drakfirewall or something. It’ll work.
The “Mandriva Club” has kept me away from Mandriva. Mandriva expects you to buy their software and then join a club for ongoing support. I don’t think so. It seems like every time I get an e-mail from Mandriva, they have some special offer or download for “club members”. Why should I join a club when I can download many good Linux distributions for free? Or I can buy Suse for less money and not have to join some damned club. I was able to download Mandriva once under a special offer. I burned a DVD twice and tried installing each one. The installation went though without a hitch. But I could never get either one to boot. Perhaps Mandriva’s club has something to do with French arrogance.
I use Mandriva at work and in my personal uses. No distro is perfect. I selected Mandrake Linux many years ago due to its relationship with some projects I was playing with. As a consultant I have used every distro and found them all to work. I never tell a client that they are using the wrong distro, I just fix it. LSB is where everything is going and Mandriva is not afaid to be one of the most compliant. As a member of the Open Source Software movement we need to be helpful and positive about all OSS to keep a clean image. Lets all support OSS.
Mandriva has always allowed install CD downloads from the first day of release(I can vouch for this and older mirrors with time stamps still under the Mandrake directory could support this). Club benefits are interesting but targeted at the developer/sysadmin base, new users and businessmen may not see the features as features.
The French are not arrogant as a whole, it is a lifestyle that some don’t get. All Americans are not big headed. Every Englishman is not plump. There are tall Chinese. The Welsh, well everything about them is true….JK
I have tried every linux distro out there and always fall back to Mandriva. Every company has it’s growing pains, and Mandriva is no exception. In my opinion, and it is only my opinion, Mandriva does more right than anyone else. They have set up to get my TVcard recognized and working with little or no effort. 3D acceleration works, period. Support for DVD players able to play commercial DVD movies no problems. RedHat, Ubuntu (have yet to figure out the excitement there) SUSE and the rest are good but not as good as Mandriva. This from a gauche, war mongoring American, Labels are so easy!
The last time I tried Mandrake it tried very hard to look flash, with all the sparkle, but none of the substance.
I downloaded the freely available single CD live/install today, put it on a spare machine and it seems to be more of the same. Lots of ‘glitz’ (pun fully intended) but still a pig to configure (I had to play “find and include the kernel module”) for the not so standard hardware I tend to buy (I flatly refuse to buy a mainboard with any onboard sound, lan, video or other combinations of same).
Perhaps the purchased version might be better, but I thought the idea of the downloadable version was to show off the wares.
Personally, my main machine is using LFS (ohh, the pain), but my home network (except the one above) are all running Gentoo because of its (seemingly) unlimited configurations.
BTW, I just hovered my mouse over your sidebar regarding distros, and my personal favourite, Gentoo, seems to be inaccurately labeled, It’s TWO days of compiling for ONE seconds speed increase
For what concerns me, Mandriva is dead. I had good experiences up to Mandrake 8.0, it was my favourite distro. Then things got bad and then worse and worse during the “transformation” to Mandriva. I have been with SUSE for a bit and one PC in my house still is, the rest is all ubuntu’s (U, K and X). The final straw that prevents me to go back and even test the newer releases has been Mandriva laying off Gael Duval. For me that’s final, there is no more room on my PCs for Mandriva. You should always pay respect to the reason of your existence and know which is the hand that brings you the food. The product can be as good as it can possibly be but for me Mandriva is dead.
Mandriva has always had some trouble with it’s image. Part of the problem is there lack of a good PR department - they trust the community to do their PR, but this often backfires when they come off as not respecting the community. I see the reactions of Mandriva users a lot, being an admin of http://www.mandrivausers.org - you’d be surprised how many negative reactions there are each time Mandriva puts out a new version. But often this problems are temporary or a PEBKAC - however, there are always a few that persist and never get fixed. I think Mandriva has a tendency to ostracize their community, though not purposely. We’ve had a few users come from Mandriva’s official forums that ended up getting questions answered on our board that did not get resolved on Mandriva’s forums. This is not a good sign
- but then, it also shows the strength and knowledge of the Mandriva community. I think Mandriva needs to do a better job of listening to this community - which they are, actually, improving on. But change takes time 
p.s. - adamw, man, why haven’t you been visiting our forums? did we scare you off?
admit it, you hate us!! /me goes off and cries
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Aliminium membership is the free membership. Basically thi is a registration to the mandriva club. You can write in to the forum, edit the wiki page, comment the news etc. You just can’t use paying services like Kiosk, club mirrors etc. AFAIK anybody can write to the Community chat part of the club forum so noone is closed out. You can register at http://my.myndriva.com
VIP membership is for contributors. AFAIK you just have to ask it in the cooker mailing list and that’s all.
Dan: you don’t have to join the Club to get support. (In fact the Club is not about support at all, except Club members helping each other out). We provide tech support on a paid-per-incident basis, and support in the form of security and bugfix updates for packages is completely free, you don’t have to be a Club member to get updated packages. The Club is completely optional, Mandriva is a fully functional distro without it.
Robert: and, er, configuring kernel modules on Gentoo is a breeze?!
tyme: honestly, I just do not have the time. Whenever someone invents a monkey cloning machine, one of me will be there like a shot.
I use Mandriva at home and on servers where I work.
I like it for a large base of packages (when compared to SuSE or RedHat/CentOS), and their “freshness” (when compared to Debian).
What I’d like to see, is a longer support lifetime, especially on servers (I know, they have their “corporate” editions…) - but that’s the problem of about every Linux distro.
I’m sorry if I didn’t explain myself properly AdamW, it’s just that Mandriva touts itself as an “automagical” type of OS, i.e. Just Works (R).
I reckon if I still have to go and do all the configuring anyway, the advertising is malarkey, however, I had the same niggle regarding the other three Just Works (R) distros, Ubuntu, Linspire and Xandros.
As for Gentoos’ kernel configuration system, GenKernel will add ALL modules by using that flag, and it now has a GUI for Portage/Emerge called PortHole, but I digress. Tweeking the kernel is not that hard, really, but most end users don’t want to know about that stuff, they would prefer to buy the OS, chuck the DVD/CD into the drive and have it install. Those same end users are unlikely to have the hardware I use as well, so it probably will Just Work (R).
On that, I reckon Mandriva 2007 does its job well, and it does do the XGL/AIGLX very well, I think this distro will be worth looking at further for those who come to me for PC support.
As for all the political malarkey surrounding Mandriva, I’m a “So What!” type of fella, it has nothing to do with how well the OS works.
mangoo: longer support lifetimes exist in the corporate server line. The problem with saying “longer support lifetime, especially on servers” is that if you’re referring to Mandriva Linux (itself), then this is problematic… we have an OS that does desktop and server, together, on one platform. How do you differentiate the two parts? Because if you support, say, Mandriva 2006 for 3 years overall, but the desktop for only one year, I guarantee you’ll have people running 2006 for four years as a desktop (I’ve spoken with many people who ask if they should be upgrading 9.2 or 10.0 (or even earlier!) just in the last month or so). Encouraging that kind of thing with a longer lifetime (ie. user thinks because their kernel is up to date that all the holes in KDE or whatever don’t matter), is pretty much a bad idea in my opinion.
That’s what the corporate server line is supposed to do. Now, I’m not a sales guy, but I think considering the cost of competing “server” products and the support they provide, it’s a pretty decent deal… I know how much work goes into those security updates of old products and come the tail end (or even mid-point due to how fast things change), it becomes quite difficult supporting the old stuff. That’s why the “mainline” product will never be supported for 3 years or more. The corporate line is designed (more or less) to make it easy enough to deal with updates over a longer period of time, and also having less packages that could be vulnerable to exploitation (although, had I designed it, it would be a lot more spartan and certainly wouldn’t come with KDE, but that’s another topic entirely).
The corporate line leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, I suspect, because it’s not free. Well, supporting a distro for five years (the length of time the corporate products are supported) is very expensive. Three years wouldn’t be too bad, for the most part, but the last two years are killer. It’s very difficult and time-consuming to backport some patches to fix security holes, which is why a lot of distros don’t do it… it’s not cost effective for a package you’re paying $50 for. You think about that for a second… that’s $10/year for 5 years of support.. that’s less than $1/mo. No consider that if only 20% of your users are actually buying a box, every time there’s a release, well… that becomes expensive. And we’re only talking support costs in terms of providing security/bugfix packages.
Anyways, just thought I’d try to enlighten you a bit on the economics of Linux support and why most companies don’t do long periods of support (if Mandriva had the same number of paying users that Windows does (willing or otherwise), supporting a distro for as long as MS supported Windows 98 would not be a problem at all).
Mandriva has always been a very good distro from a technical standpoint, but IMO the company behind it acts like crazy. I don’t want to comment on Duval, but even earlier there have been signs of rather unsual behavior. That’s the main reason I stopped using it, after being a club member for three years.
I do use Mandriva for all my computers (except website servers, i connot choose there) and for me there is no better distro. Neither a better model. I was in the club for a year or two, and i didn’t update my paying when they stoped having 6 months release periods. But In August I paid back (now I’m silver), so I could get the next version as fast as possible.
I simply undestand a distro is a job a group of people do and I understand It has a cost if you wanna have it done right.
urpmi is much better than any apt-get. you urpmi something in the command line and it tells you a list of what if found with that name. You cannot do it with apt-get (never found it).
SUSE users are microsoft customers now. How do you see that?
Ubuntu toke away Mandriva’s users, but they still have no clear way to make their system payable. What happens if some day Marc dies?
There is still a big hole in Mandriva anyway: Sync with devices. That is something that must be arranged in a very short period of time. I have those mobile phones and the n700 and I had a Jornada WinCe and I’ve never been able to simply sync everithing togheter.
I hope they put a lot of efford to include opensync 0.19 into mandriva 2007.1. That will make the distro quite perfect.
I have been a mandrake/mandriva user since 2002. I joined the club as a standard member when it was first started. I believe that there is no “free lunch”. The company needs financial support to survive. I have 2007 installed on my system and 2006 on my wife’s. It is strictly for home use. I just installed beryl. At 72, I am far from being a techie. However I have found that over the last four years that despite every attempt by me to destroy my system there has always been somebody out there to help me recover with very little loss of data. I am always amazed at how my system bounces back. I have been very impressed with the support available in the mandriva community.
I have been useing mandrake on and off for the last five years or so and I feel it is an excelent operating system. I have tried ubuntoo i didn’t like it too much, mainly the fact that it seemed to steer users away from installing programs other than their own premade packages. Mandrake comes with it’s own packeges and allows you to go install the gz’s as well (I understand ubuntoo does as well i’m just refering to the default settings). The only reason I don’t strictly use Mandrake is because I like to play video games. If I could play them on Linux I’d drop windows instantly. Besides Ubuntoo and Mandrake I really haven’t used too many other distros. I have used many other live cd’s but just for computer forensics. In my experience Mandriva (sorry i still call it mandrake) is an amazing operating system and I have had few problems with it. I do have to say that it is alot harder to find the free version of the OS than it used to be. I hope the developers read and follow this article, I don’t want to see mandrake become just another money maker.
I have asked just a couple of technical support questions from Mandriva, and got no answers at all even when I was under paid support, or later when I joined the club. So I have no good will towards them, would never pay them anything again. I have found their Gnome window management buggy, along with lots of other glitches
I kind of agree with Karl; when I had some technical issues Mandriva support was no help at all. Imagine my surprise when I found out I was expected to pay per support incident in addition to the $100+ I was paying yearly for club membership. I tried the Mandriva forums and they were not particularly helpful either. I use Ubuntu now and am unlikely to switch back.
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i am a nontech person.i used windows only because it was on my computer but i was constantly having to reformat c and heard about linux.
i spent 6 months asking questions on the different distros.checking out irc support channels and just learning.
i picked mandrake 8.2.i had a little trouble with some of the choices and left myself vulnerable because of services i had started but with patience was able to learn how to close those down.it took effort and lots of reading for me to understand but it wasnt any harder than losing everything using windows.
getting a printer going went very good music was easy this version.then i installed 9.1 and it was ok ,but 9.2 was a nitemare,no sound and losing MCC when i updated thru it was so hard that if i had not been taught a little command language i would have had to reformat to recover.but the command line saved me and the system was reparable.i now run 2005LE and am planning on buying the newest version,but i am also thinking of trying another distro.i dont do it for the challenge as lots do.i do it because i want to be able to feel safe receiving email,listen to music and surf web sites.i just want less hasssle.
being a grandmother and nontechy means i dont want to learn about newest greatest.-:)
i just want it to work.
br3n