[sclug] Re: sclug Digest, Vol 4, Issue 7

[Neil Haughton]

>
> Subject:
> [sclug] Mandrake
> From:
> Tony Sumner <whittycat at ntlworld.com>
> Date:
> Fri, 9 Jan 2004 15:43:26 +0000
> To:
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
>
>
>There was a discussion a short while ago about distros and one
>person (sorry, forgotten who) said that Mdk 9.1 was ok but Mdk 9.2
>was a disaster. ....
>Does anyone actually _like_ Mandrake?
>
>  
>

I do! (It was me who wrote about 9.2, having trashed my home partition 
attempting to install it.)

With the exception of that disaster Mandrake is actually the only 
desktop distro I have managed to install (fully, with all devices 
working except my HP scanner which is impossibly stubborn) without 
endless headaches, and I have been using it since v8.1. I've tried 
Gentoo 1.4, Suse 8, Redhat 7.1 and a few lesser known distro's, and I 
bottled out from all of them (with the exception of Suse) when I 
realised that whilst they were probably very good if I wanted to spend 
endless hours learning how to install and configure things, if I wanted 
something out of the box that I could just get on and use (like Windows 
but somewhat less flakey, and a refreshing change from all the MS stuff 
I am compelled to use in the daily grind) Mandrake was the best fit. 
Perhaps I am not clever enough, but having read cover to cover Linux 
Complete, RedHat Unleashed and several other interesting tomes I still 
found it hard work getting things to work. Great for a competent Unix 
Sysadmin, but I don't have much skill or ambition in that direction.  
For an out of the box, stable and easy to use desktop system Mandrake 
turned out to be the one that suits me.

There are apparently about 20,000 paid up members of the Mandrake Club, 
so I am not the only one who likes it :-)

9.2 was a shot in the foot, I think, released too early in a desperate 
attempt to increase revenue IMHO. Something similar happened with 8.1, 
with 8.2 fixing a whole lot of things that had previously worked in 8.0

Regards,

Neil Haughton