“This post I am sure will make a lot of people mad. Mandrake,
after all, is the poster child for Linux on the desktop and has a
fairly large following. It was at one time evolutionary! It was one
of the first (if not the first) to have an ‘easy’ installer. It
created tools and wizards for helping users configure their
operating system. They had focus (the desktop), they had a strong
user community, and they were one of the first to market. Today it
is another story, most its competitors have caught up to Mandrake
in terms of ease of use, being easy to install, and in
professionalism (if Mandrake ever really had any of that).“Somewhere along the way Mandrake faltered. Be it the fault of a
management team that tried to spread it’s roots into eLearning, not
adapting to the market fast enough, or lacking a clear focus
Mandrake has fallen into disarray. Plagued by financial problems
and a charity-like pleading to the community for money on several
occasions Mandrake filed for the French equivalency of the U.S.
Chapter 11 Bankruptcy to protect itself from its debtors. It would
seem to me that everything would be riding on their next release.
So I ask, why not put this release on hold until it was absolutely
the best it could be with revolutionary functionality and ease of
use. Why rush to market to meet their (in my mind stupid) 6 month
release cycle? Is 6 months really long enough to let a platform
make its way into the public and settle anyway? (again, that’s
another story)“I will have to admit that I, after 5+ years of using Linux as
my primary OS, have recently been disenchanted by the prospects of
Linux on the ‘consumer’ desktop. That is an article in itself, but
many of my frustrations and recent insights on the desktop movement
stem from using Mandrake and watching its development
process(cooker) in action…”
[Editor’s Note: The site is now up again, as of 0515 GMT.
-BKP]