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The end for Mandriva

An anonymous reader has pointed out that Mandriva is currently being liquidated (page in French). The company brought in €553,000 in 2013, but that is seemingly not enough to keep it going in 2015. It is a sad end for a company that has been pursuing the desktop Linux dream since 1998.
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The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 13:31 UTC (Tue) by amimjf (guest, #506) [Link]

Its a shame, for a long time the Mandriva installer was the best in the business, i must have installed Mandriva 10/11 on loads of computers and laptops 3/4 years ago. I have a powerpack edition with real printed manuals somewhere.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 13:51 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]

Mandriva is the first and only distribution I payed good money for, back when it was still Mandrake. Good old days. I've moved on long ago.

Conectiva return?!

Posted May 26, 2015 13:49 UTC (Tue) by higuita (guest, #32245) [Link]

When Mandrake acquired Conectiva (and merged it) i saw the end of a great distro. Maybe now it can reborn.

Conectiva was big in South America and while less known in the USA and Europe, it was as good or even better than redhat,mandrake or suse.

Conectiva return?!

Posted May 26, 2015 15:39 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Conectiva had apt-rpm, which made life a lot easier for RPM distro users (people had apt-rpm repos for RedHat / Fedora). This spurred RedHat into adopting yum and working on it, to provide a similar ability to be able to easily search for and install a package + all its dependencies (though, incredibly slower in its early days).

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 15:07 UTC (Tue) by tonyblackwell (subscriber, #43641) [Link]

Fortunately its successor Mageia is only days away (all things coming together) from its 5th release, so at least the heritage is well passed-on.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 17:22 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

It seems like many of the most fundamental issues with desktop Linux have been addressed. Desktop environments and other software are mostly nice and polished before distros even have to touch them. Much of the integration and cohesiveness that was once the domain of a Linux distribution now occurs upstream.

There's still room for non-traditional Linux distributions to innovate and experiment, and there's still a baseline level of polish expected of a distribution, but I wonder to what degree traditional Linux distributions are suffering because the baseline has surpassed what they grew up having to provide? How much room is there for more traditional Linux distributions?

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 18:08 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Can you clarify what you mean by traditional vs non-traditional? Distribution vendors like Red Hat and SUSE continue to do a lot of integration work upstream rather than just at the distribution level (installers, configuration tools, package management etc) so I am not sure how you are looking at it.

The role of GNU/Linux distros

Posted May 26, 2015 18:36 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Well, what do distros do? Besides the technical work of integration, they verify freeness and act as a filter to anti-features.

Cooperation between upstream projects is great, but sometimes upstream is a company with internally conflicting interests. Some companies wish they could gather data about users, or mix some proprietary software in with their free software. Distros are the filter, and because the companies know that bad stuff would be filtered out, they generally don't put bad stuff in in the first place.

I'm suspicious of projects that try to bypass the distros. I do install a handful of plugins from outside my distro (Debian), but I get everything else from my distro.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 17:27 UTC (Tue) by samuelgraeff (guest, #102782) [Link]

I'm very sad with this bad news.

Conectiva did many contributions to the free software community, one of them that I remember was synaptic (a graphical package management), that is in use, even nowadays by many distros.

It's a huge lost.

The end for Mandriva

Posted May 26, 2015 20:24 UTC (Tue) by xorbe (subscriber, #3165) [Link]

Luckily openSUSE is a solid KDE distribution, and filled the gap nicely for me. Mandrake had horrible policies resulting in nearly broken ISOs every single release.


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