Mandriva Goes Out of Business

[Max Norris]

Shoot haven't even thought about Mandrake in many years.. didn't know they were still around.  Think I still got a really old version on floppies somewhere along with my old Red Hat.. one of them was my first Linux install after temporarily getting away from Unix, forget which I did first.

[Xilo]

Not surprised. Mandrake/Mandriva was always a terrible distro.

[Ironman273]

That joke has gotten so lame that it's taken an arrow to the knee!

Ouch! Let me fly out of here on Nyan Cat! 

[WinMacLin Guy]

If someone with a couple of million to spare invested in some UX/UI designers and got the hardware manufacturers to sort drivers out i think it could become a rival to windows.

 

Red Hat, Novell (now Micro Focus International), Canonical have all invested billions trying to make desktop Linux more friendly and get hardware manufacturers and third-parties on board. Canonical, and more specifically, their founder and funder Mark Shuttleworth have spent millions specifically on desktop Linux. In fact, when you look at Canonical' s finances, you will see that since their founding they have yet to turn a profit and are relying on Shuttleworth to keep them in business. The problem remains that desktop Linux is highly fragmented, continues to be system centric as opposed to user centric in many ways (though it has gotten better over the users, fundamental problems still exist especially when it comes to driver installation, updating components like the X Server, installing and uninstalling things without reliance on a package manager, etc); none of these are major issues for servers or specialized embedded systems, and indeed Linux is more than competent to run on such systems, but it is a significant challenge to get desktop users (most of them not highly computer literate) to adopt Linux. Many of these users do not even care what OS they are running so long as it runs all of the apps they require, is compatible with their hardware, and is not overly complex to use; and this presents a huge challenge to desktop Linux because not only does it not really meet the needs of many of these folks in the state that it is in right now but Microsoft's agreements with OEMs and an overall lack of will from the user side of things is preventing mass adoption.

[Aergan]

Mandrake introduced KDE to me. I've been with Gnome or XFCE ever since.

 

RIP untrademarkable duck.

[300z]

I went to Mandriva (originally Mandrake) from RedHat Linux (where I started) due to better hardware support (rather surprising, since Mandrake then, and Mandriva today, stuck with the same RPM format as RHL).  Mandriva is one of the two distributions that were the "children" of Mandrake (the other is Mageia, which those orphaned by Mandriva may want to consider).  Still, that nasty split into Mandriva and Mageia damaged Mandriva more than Mageia - especially since Mandriva wound up with most of the debt carried over from Mandrake.

I still have Mageia on a VM that I use from time to time. I like it.

[f0rk_b0mb]

Red Hat and Novell (now Micro Focus International) have all invested billions trying to make desktop Linux more friendly and get hardware manufacturers and third-parties on board.

 

No, they haven't. Red hat and Novell are server companies that sponsor communities that maintain consumer versions of their OS's. (example: Red Hat -> Fedora or SLES -> openSUSE, ect.) It makes sense from a business perspective. Community test new software -> Company implements stable, well tested software into their paid products. Both companies have been home run hit successful in what they do and the market they target.