If you hadn't noticed, Linux-Mandrake is a business. They're in an
obvious version war with RedHat, and always try and have their latest
distribution greater than RedHat's (i.e. 8.0 > 7.2).
Eric
________________________________________________________________
Eric Krout
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~ekrout (Soon, EricKrout.com)
Bucknell Computer Science & Engineering '03
Chairman, Bucknell's Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM)
On Fri, 11 May 2001, Chris Spencer wrote:
> I just wanted to express a sincere thank-you to everyone on this list. From
> the developers, to the long time subscribers, and even the newbies. You all
> have helped me in incredible ways to learn, adopt, and embrace the GNU/Linux
> environment.
>
> I installed Linux Mandrake for the first time about a year and a half ago, I
> think version 7.0. Previous to that I was using SuSE 6.3. I was a total
> newbie and asked a lot of annoying questions. At that time, Linux Mandrake
> blew me away. It was easy to install, easy to work with, fun to play with,
> but best of all the information I could pick up from the newbie and expert
> lists was amazing. I religiously read through every email, even if it didn't
> apply to me, so I could learn more about the amazing features of a
> Linux-based operating system.
>
> But times they are a changing. Mandrake is aiming their distribution at
> newbies - a great idea! That said, I disagree with Mandrake's direction of
> releasing a cutting edge distro aimed for newbie use. 8.0, although it has a
> lot of bells and whistles, was rushed but is unstable and frustrating to use.
> Cutting edge is nice, but some serious QA needs to be done IF your target
> audience is the newbie crowd.
>
> Developers, think about your first experiences with Linux. What did you like
> about it so much? I am willing to bet that one of the top reasons was
> stability. It doesn't crash. And everything "works".
>
> If I were a newbie and installed Linux Mandrake my first impression would be
> "Wow, that was easier to install than I thought it would be." And I would
> probably be impressed with the way things worked. I would not be impressed,
> though, with the bugs that are shipped. I would not be impressed with how the
> software update feature didn't work properly right out of the box. I would
> also not be impressed with how a seemingly innocent update would wreck my
> working environment. I'm talking about the recent kdelibs update.
>
> Some serious QA needs to happen if you plan to release a distro aimed at the
> newbie crowd. Otherwise you risk turning them away from Linux completely if
> things don't work right. The beta was frozen for what, two or three days
> before the official release? Thats not right. There are too many kinks in
> Mandrake 8.0 to make it release quality. A month from final beta to release
> candidate would have solved a lot of them.
>
> Not being a newbie anymore and feeling disgruntled after the release of
> Mandrake 8.0 I have removed it from my system and have installed a different
> distribution, one more aimed at experts. I haven't been this happy since I
> installed Mandrake 7.0. I have all the bells and whistles (plus more) that
> Mandrake 8.0 has and more stability than I am used to.
>
> Once again, thanks to everyone for helping learn this operating environment.
> Its a big change from Windows, but man, is it worth it.
>
> -Chris
>
>
>
>
>
>
