Hi! I joined the beta testing for Mandrake because I like the distro, but chose to run RedHat 7.2 instead of Mandrake 8.1 as the latter had too many things not working for me. I hoped that if I joined the testing I could contribute to a much more stable and error free distro. I think that was achieved to some degree, but there are still a number of problems as released in 8.2 that I do not have with RH 7.2 .
I think the quality of the distro itself is very important. We can have all kinds of nifty upgrades, but ordinary people do not download them, and stick to the initial releases as they come on the distro CDs. Have MandrakeSoft any ideas of how well used the upgrading SW is? How big a percentage of your users do not upgrade? Anyway, this was my first beta, as it may have showed in my reporting. I hoped that the release policy was that you would not ship before most errors were solved. Not so, you had a deadline. Well, it is good to know this, that these are the rules of the game. I would like to suggest that Mandrakesoft try to make an effort to make a stability release, where the release is not so much deadline driven, but driven by the non-severity of the bugs. A little more concrete: Mandrake has an enterprise edition. There is not so much hype about this. And enterprises really appreciate stability, and lack of errors. Maybe Mandrakesoft could try to fix all the errors in 8.2 and then issue this as the Enterprise edition, with the added bells and whistles that you normally do for that? And without the big specific deadline, or with a deadline that would allow a lot of testing and bug solving. Kind regards keld
