[ Thanks to jeremy for this link.
]
“LQ) Before releasing the first Mandrake version (which was
based on Red Hat) you were working on a Slackware-based OS. Any
regrets on that distro switch? Do you think things would be
different had you not made that change?“GD) No regret at all, for a simple reason: it was not serious
anymore to release a Linux distribution without a good package
management like RPM. I seriously considered to switch to Debian as
a base because at the time, Red Hat’s reaction was very unclear (as
far as I know, forking from a commercial Linux distribution never
happened before Mandrake). But back in 1998, Debian’s installation
procedure was really not friendly at all. As a result, a key
success of Mandrake was also that all packages made for Red Hat
were compatible with Mandrake, including commercial packages. So
the choice of RPM was the good one…”