Comments on: Sad metrics on community decline

By: WFTL Bytes! for Dec 8, 2008 | WFTL Bytes!

WFTL Bytes! for Dec 8, 2008 | WFTL Bytes! — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:20:31 +0000

[...] The end for Mandriva : one viewpoint [...]

By: Gros d

Gros d — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:58:38 +0000

[...] Gros d

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:50:55 +0000

I dunno. All of the LUG lists I’ve been on over the years have declined in volume. I think it’s because the various Linux distros have just become so good that folks have a lot less grief both installing and using it all so there is just less to write about. Similarly, a few years ago folks used to lug hardware to a monthly meeting of a LUG I was in to get problems sorted. Now the odd laptop comes in by arrangement so folks can demonstrate this or that cutting edge stuff. I now go to a weekly meeting of computer buffs, mixed environment, Mac, Win and a few Linux heads. Only Win users bring their boxes to sort problems.

By: vdanen

vdanen — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:49:46 +0000

Clifford: re the mailing list vs forum thing, I’m with you. Regarding documentation, I have no idea how that is going or what is happening there. When I first started with Mandriva, part of my duties was to work on documentation and it was excellent (not because of me, of course, but there were a number of us working on it).

Also, the Club thing hasn’t been “for-pay” for quite a while. Anyone can join the Club now AFAIK, and the forums are open to the public as well as everything else. I think the only thing that is for-pay now is a subscription to download the powerpack release.

By: vdanen

vdanen — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:33:17 +0000

Yup. Here they are. Keep in mind the archive for the bugs list started in July of 2007, so the 2007 stats are for only half a year:

bugs-2008: 62819
bugs-2007: 35256

By: manuell

manuell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:26:23 +0000

Could you give us the numbers for the “bugzila ML”?

By: Clifford

Clifford — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:17:58 +0000

I started using Mandrake with its very first version and gave up on Mandriva two years ago after I got tired of the dealing with bugs that were going unresolved, packages being unmaintained, and lots of incomplete or missing documentation. Before anyone suggests, “Well, why didn’t you pitch in and help?”, I did. I used to be a very active contributor on the IRC channel and though it’s not the be all and end all, I had “voice” on the channel. I documented things and became proficient enough with MDV packages to create my own packages.

It used to annoy me when people would accuse Mandriva of making it deliberately difficult to find the free version so that people would be more inclined to buy the boxed set. Now, I don’t think that’s an unjustified criticism. I haven’t had a boxed set of Mandriva for years so I have no idea what, if any, difference there is in the quality of the documentation for Club members but if the documentation for Club members isn’t any better, this distro is all but dead. Then again, if it is appreciably better, it’s still dead. You don’t tend to get much useful user contributed documentation if it’s all hidden behind a for-pay “membership” site. All you have to do is to look at the amount of free documentation for Debian and its derivatives and Red Hat and its derivatives and you’ll see a striking difference in favour of those distros in the quality and quantity compared to Mandriva. That’s a shame because Mandriva has some excellent features and it’s still the most polished desktop distro on the market. People rave about K/Ubuntu but I can tell you as a Kubuntu user that it’s still not up to the standard of Mandriva in terms of polish.

If Mandriva is so good, why not continue using it? Simple. I want to use a distro that has a vibrant and active community behind it with lots of high-quality documentation. I wasn’t getting that with Mandriva so I rather than fight, I switched. It hasn’t been a bed of roses in Ubuntu land and I still keep a foot in the Red Hat camp via Fedora (10 is very impressive). On balance, I prefer either of those distros to Mandriva today.

I use Linux not only on my desktop but on servers. Especially Fedora has some very impressive features, like FreeIPA, clustering, and Cocoon for deployment. Having a sentimental soft spot for Mandriva, occasionally, I’ll get sucked into installing Mandriva and attempting something like Mandriva Terminal Server only to be disappointed, again, that the docs are ancient and incomplete and the packages unmaintained.

By the way, I hate forums and prefer mailing lists. If that’s the primary mode of support for Mandriva, that only further reinforces why I no longer want to use it. There are ways of integrating forums and mailing lists but it takes a bit of work.

By: abhijeet

abhijeet — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:48:59 +0000

If u are correct then it is heart breaking for me. I am using mandriva from 2006. It is the operating system of my choice. Long live mandriva

By: Carls

Carls — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:13:26 +0000

One reason Mandriva is down in popularity for new users is the incredible arrogance of their replies to questions from newbies. There is a lot of “système D” still there (get yourself out of the fog, roughly). For examples, just tune in to their forums…

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:47:35 +0000

vdanen,

Mailing lists are maybe old technology. I used to use them. Now I just google for stuff.