[Wylug-discuss] Has Mandriva regained the polish? was Re: [Wylug-help] Edimax Print Server Configuration

[Anne Wilson]

On Thursday 18 January 2007 23:28, shaun laughey wrote:
> Sorry for the confusion there, I think the OP was using Ubuntu and I was
> sad that they don't get the magnificent printerdrake. Still one of the best
> things I've seen when printing on Linux.
>
> You have reminded me that I've been meaning to look at Mandriva again this
> year.
>
> One of the many things that made me jump from Mandriva and cancel my
> licences was the butchering of all those great tools in 2006 in favour of
> new ones that just were all gui and no brilliance and a buggy X when it had
> been as stable as a rock for the previous 4 years.
>
> Every upgrade was perfect. Every install smooth. All my servers, all my
> desktops everything upgraded and patched and ran well for years.
> Occassional driver issues were easily solved or bypassed until DKMS came
> and spoilt some of that.
>
> Well, I missed that polish during the 2006 release - it just felt like a
> rush job to coincide with a stock market announcment and their
> merger/takeover.
>
> With lots of things dropped for no good reason and new features poorly done
> or partly implemented they lost my custom and support fairly quickly. Even
> the lovely new members site was a pain and didn't work with lynx unlike the
> old one.
>
> So I wonder if Mandriva have regained that professionalism they seemed to
> have ditched last year or is it just another gentoo -like cutting edge
> crash test dummy?
>
I've been too busy on my main workstation, FC6, to really test MDV2007, but 
much as I like Fedora, I do have some hankerings over Mandriva.  There are 
times when I'm sorely tempted to go back.  I agree that the 2006 distro upset 
many people and lost them many users.  The upheavals in the company 
reorganisation showed up very badly.  Having said all that, so many things 
were easier and better done in Mandriva.  So many things need me to tinker in 
FC6 to get them to work, where they worked without a problem in Mandriva.

I'm thinking of issues such as the one I've just been fighting.  I use xawtv 
to monitor recording from my analogue camcorder.  In MDV it just worked.  In 
Fedora I have to find the framebuffer address and pass it to v4l - and it 
doesn't stick.  I have to do it every day that I want to record.

Anne
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://list.wylug.org.uk/pipermail/wylug-discuss/attachments/20070119/84513db4/attachment.bin