[Sussex] Mandrake bankrupt

[Derek Harding]

> I saw this on Slashdot.  Sad in a way - but they think they can turn it
> around, despite going through a very bad patch (Mandrake 8 sucked) they seem
> to be improving their product slowly and their revenues are up quite a lot.
> 
> I just don't see where Mandrakes market is these days (apart from the
> obvious answer - France) they aren't as good as SuSE at a general distro and
> on the user-friendly distro front, well, the whole world seems to think that
> "behaving and looking like Windows" is where it's at (not sure I agree) so
> Lindows, Xandros and Lycoris have that market.

Mandrake is very popular in France (I suspect 90% of the Nantes academic area use it) and one of the guys at my company was with Mandrake.

He came to us having been made redundant. He was on their helpdesk so is quite useful for some of our up-coming clients for support.

I found the 7 series OK to load but 8 wasn't up to much. 9? I'll judge later but it has some odd foibles. I agree about the perception of "windoze" looks being what the market demands - even professionals who should know better ask us if we can make it look like M$ because of the staff "learning curve". I usually defeat that by throwing xfce on my laptop at any non-tech around the table.

-- 
Best wishes,
Derek