On September 21, 2003 04:25 pm, Rolf Pedersen wrote: > I don't know if you think I am from some other continent but I am in > Oakland, CA, USA. It might be the majority of North Americans would > rather buy a pack in a store but I am here, I bought the 7.1 Power Pack > online from a nearby reseller, and I have downloaded ever since. > > Linux (as experienced through Mandrake, mostly) is hardly without > substantial discomfort due to a rapid rate of change. There are changes > in the software, in how things are done, in things being not where you > have just learned to find them. As an advocate, I would suggest that > those who think it would be a good thing to continue to use Mandrake in > future should accomodate this one further increment of change discomfort > by finding a way to support Mandrake that Mandrake can currently afford > to do.
I do the best I can in that regard. Given the engrained preferences I noted before it's a hard slog. After some 6 months of talking to a couple of small business people about it both have now decided to try Mandrake but that took the Blaster worm to nudge them over the edge. Actually I started a bit earlier with 5.2 PowerPack and started downloading at 8.0. And I've been a club member since that started, though currently not. (In case you think I'm freeloading, I intend to renew at the first opportunity. :-) ) And, after I sent the reply I did look at your email addy and discovered you are in the USA. Actually I'm just up the coast in Vancouver, BC, Canada. So we're practically neighbours. (We get that feeling of a ton of long lost relatives in the summer here when CA license plates seem to outnumber our own. :-) ) At the moment little is stable, as you note. A lot of Linux distros are reinventing themselves with RedHat targeting the medium to large corporations and service contracts through their partnerships with IBM among others. SuSE appears to be scattering itself across the board but doing so with lots of promotion and a very polished distro. Mandrake is a different ballgame, in the sense that it has to refocus on its core business after running off in a whole pile of different directions under some previous management. And it really is the only choice we have to support them even if we disagree with some of the choices they have made. I do want this distro to survive. As for relearning, that isn't unique to Linux. Pity the poor people who have to deal with M$oft who change things with their patches. But the relearning here is one more of rapid maturity than some sort of control-freak paranoia and then the sense that things can be extended to areas that haven't been done, at least properly, before. The joy of Linux and of Mandrake in particular is one of continued experimentation and the involvement of the community. Both great things. Let's continue to both have that aim in mind and, with respect to the idea of boxes on shelves, agree to disagree with some degree of respect for each others position. ttfn John
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