Mandriva 2010 kicks some major arse

English Open Chat
21

I was running Mandriva 2010 on an Asus 1000HE for a while. I really liked it but I noticed that it would sometimes fail to pick up on the CPU scaling in Powerdevil which annoyed me as I wanted to fix it and couldn’t, as it wasn’t stepping the CPU speed correctly. Also I sometimes felt like it lagged a bit moving between windows. I tried and now run Opensuse 11.2 and I find it marginally faster than Mandriva 2010. Also CPU scaling is working correctly.

But as others have said there’s very little between them. Mandriva is slighly more polished than Opensuse. But then Opensue appeals to the inner geek in me with YAST…:wink: But I think both are the 2 best KDE4 distro’s out there at the moment!

22

You’re way off on the community thing. Mandriva has excellent community support, which is smaller than the Opensuse ones, but is really prompt at helping folks with issues. You have several members of the development community and QA folks regularly helping out users in the forums.

urpmi is as fast as zypper on 11.2. While zypper has evolved over time to be on par with urpmi…Mandriva was the first RPM distro to tackle RPM-dependency hell with urpmi.

Anshul

Edit: I am an active Mandriva community member, ans also an avid Opensuse fan…so comments are balanced in both ways.

23

panther86,
If I recall you were an active poster in the Mandriva forums…did the community treat you any differently? I don’t think there is an “anti-English” bias on the forums. While Mandriva has made tons of mistakes (the biggest being letting go of Adam and the founder Gael Duval), loose a fair amount of money…they still manage to get an excellent release out of the door.

Anshul

24

Does 2010 have x86_64 bit version for desktops.
I had checked their site, but did not see 64bit.
Does any one have any news about this?

25

I tried Mandriva last week after reading this thread (I think!). I found it a bit “kitchy”, I mean it was OK, but I really didn’t understand the “package management” (or rather lack of), and didn’t find how to get a list of software available to install. But the broadcom wireless driver was installed and running without batting an eyelid, and (if I rmemeber correctly) the multimedia was also ready to go. Their implementation of KDE4 was a huge disappointment, it looks like they tried with all their might to make it look/feel/work exactly like KDE3. Fine if you are a KDE3 fan, but it just threw all the good parts of KDE4 out of the window for no good reason in my opinion. Also I have no idea what different versions are, there was no clear explanation, so I downloaded “Mandriva one, 2010, KDE4” whatever that was. In my opinion, I would say it was OK, but far from “kicking arse”, although I guess that depends on which arse you are talking about :).

26

I tried Mandriva before finally landing on openSUSE 10.3. The problem I had with it was bad support from the community and I thought that the desktop was unstable. I also had trouble configuring stuff with the default tool. I used to be running Windows. Then I found openSUSE and 3 things made it my main/only distro;

  1. Stable KDE desktop

I like using KDE because it is so much more stable than many other KDE distros I have tried. In 11.2, KDE4.3 is so stable that it hasn’t even crashed once since I installed it on the release date.

  1. Webpin

Who doesn’t like that? An easy to use search that allows you to get almost anything you want? Sometimes you don’t feel like doing research or you’re just too lazy.

  1. YaST

Who can complain about that? It’s fast, easy, and it works great! The best thing about YaST is it’s package manager. The GUI is really nice and simple but it also works great when you don’t feel like using zypper.

Another great feature about YaST that I love is it text interface. You know, sometimes you really need to do something but you f***** up you Xorg so all you can do is use the console. It works really well and it’s not much different than the GUI version.

And of course it’s network services are really cool.

Oh! I almost forgot, openSuSE comes with many of the software you need such as OO.org, Firefox, GIMP, etc… It also intergrtes many apps into openSUSE & KDE such Firefox. And Novell works on OO.org which makes it that much cooler. Also, it’s community is really cool and you need help, you can be sure that you’ll get an answer really fast. It’s also cool for it’s General chit-chat! :stuck_out_tongue:

In case some of you are wondering, I have tried MANY distros including Slackware, Ubuntu, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mint, etc… Tried over 20 so far but I have slowed down after trying openSUSE for the first time with 10.3

I hope that openSUSE will continue improving as it has been doing for the last couple of years and I hope that I’ll still be using it! :smiley:

27

I tried Mandriva before finally landing on openSUSE 10.3. The problem I had with it was bad support from the community and I thought that the desktop was unstable. I also had trouble configuring stuff with the default tool. I used to be running Windows. Then I found openSUSE and 3 things made it my main/only distro;

1. Stable KDE desktop
**
I like using KDE because it is so much more stable than many other KDE distros I have tried. In 11.2, KDE4.3 is so stable that it hasn’t even crashed once since I installed it on the release date.
**
2. Webpin

Who doesn’t like that? An easy to use search that allows you to get almost anything you want? Sometimes you don’t feel like doing research or you’re just too lazy.

3. YaST

Who can complain about that? It’s fast, easy, and it works great! The best thing about YaST is it’s package manager. The GUI is really nice and simple but it also works great when you don’t feel like using zypper.

Another great feature about YaST that I love is it text interface. You know, sometimes you really need to do something but you f***** up you Xorg so all you can do is use the console. It works really well and it’s not much different than the GUI version.

And of course it’s network services are really cool.

Oh! I almost forgot, openSuSE comes with many of the software you need such as OO.org, Firefox, GIMP, etc… It also intergrtes many apps into openSUSE & KDE such Firefox. And Novell works on OO.org which makes it that much cooler. Also, it’s community is really cool and you need help, you can be sure that you’ll get an answer really fast. It’s also cool for it’s General chit-chat! :stuck_out_tongue:

In case some of you are wondering, I have tried MANY distros including Slackware, Ubuntu, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mint, etc… Tried over 20 so far but I have slowed down after trying openSUSE for the first time with 10.3

I hope that openSUSE will continue improving as it has been doing for the last couple of years and I hope that I’ll still be using it! :smiley:

28

I tried mandriva on my netbook, I loved the mobile broadband monitor, seemed stable enough but I hated the fact that no matter what I did I could not get vlc to run, dragonplayer was next to useless so I was left with smplayer.

29

Mandriva 2010 is good, but I find openSUSE 11.2 better… seriously!

30

Ahh, I remember when Mandriva were called “Mandrake”, coming from RedHat 5.1, Mandrake 6.0 was a major improvement, usily you could get sound in just a couple of hours of configuration :wink:

Seriously, haven’t tried mandriva for two years or so, but I liked what I saw back then. However, my desktop is something I also want to use for work (as a developer & integrator) so I prefer to have a stable company behind it.

And yes, I’m also one of the Yast lovers

31

I’ve been using Mandriva 2010 for some time, and while it was nice, it does have some major issues, which eventually made me switch to openSuse. Some examples:

  • Speedboot doesn’t work. Having it enabled, I rather often had it crashing during booting, with a completely black screen - no error messages, nothing! Looking at their forum, that seemed common, and disabling it made it much better, but it still sometimes happened.
  • It can’t display non-ascii filenames on ntfs partitions. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get it to work, reading the man pages for mount and /etc/fstab, trying to change the parameters, posting in the forum… nothing worked >:(
  • Cpu power saving doesn’t work, it always runs at full power and thus somewhat hotter.
  • Printer support has some odd quirks. You always have to switch the printer off and on again before you can start printing.
  • The Network Manager doesn’t work properly, so I couldn’t specify a cutom dns server - it would always ignore the settings made there. I eventually had to hunt down the proper file to use (which took a good amount of time) and edit it manually to make things work.
  • Scim is broken in 2010, so you can’t input foreign languages (e.g. Japanese).
  • PulseAudio is broken, I had to disable it to get any sound at all.
  • DragonPlayer is a disaster. Some other video players work poorly as well.
  • No effort is made to integrate apps like Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp etc. into the Kde desktop, so they look rather displaced.
  • Package updates are very slow and take a long time to show up.
  • Many apps are missing. If it wasn’t for the Mib 3rd party packages…

True. There are some threads in their forum from people complaining about poor (or even completely lacking) support from the company.

The Mandriva Control Centre is nice, but I clearly wouldn’t call it the best. It does have some issues, part of it because it’s a poor Gtk implementation.
I like Yast much better there.

32

Thank you for these informations! Always good to know what happens in the neighbour`s yard… :slight_smile: