Is mandrake stealing this gentoo'rs heart?

Gil-galad55 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 02 Feb 2004 Posts: 101

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knefas · l33t Joined: 21 Dec 2003 Posts: 828

not mine

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20090

Moved from Other Things Gentoo.
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nrl · Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 446 Location: Glasgow, UK

makoffee if you don't mind could you please post an update in a month or two?
I have always found in the past that these "easy to use" distributions are easy to install but become a pain to maintain. For example when I tried RH I found the number of packages offered was so limited compared to Gentoo or Debian that I was compiling most things from source and for someone who isn't terribly organised things soon became a mess.

So I would be very interested to hear how things go in Mandrake 10.

Oh, and whatever you choose: good luck!
Thanks

.

Crg · Guru Joined: 29 May 2002 Posts: 345 Location: London

F16PilotJumper · Posted: Fri Mar 26, 2004 7:31 pm Post subject:

I don't know, my objective with linux is to learn about the underlying system more then having a nice Windows-style system that detects all my hardware for me and does voodoo magic to make it work.

I tried Mandrake 7, 8, 8.?, 9, and 9.? at different points. My longest experience was with 9.2, for a few months. I got comfy with the basics of the GUI, but when it came to altering the rather bloated config that Mandrake had provided me with, I was lost.

So, I switched to Gentoo. Most of my major config files I have created myself, I keep my own backups of, I know whats going on. To be honest, most stuff doesn't take much longer to compile then it would to download and uncompress an RPM - perhaps faster due to our local network (7MB/s) Gentoo mirror. If it does, I can do other things while it compiles.

If you want an easy-to-use distro and you don't care how the hell it works, fine, go with Mandrake. But you don't learn a lot and it sure as heck isn't the fastest solution out there.

TheChuckster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Aug 2003 Posts: 91

Mandrake had several problems with me. First, the default security is horrible. My friend port scanned me and I had stuff I'd never use running like ftpd, apache, etc. I even tried to install Mandrake as minimally as possible by unchecking almost everything in the custom install window, but I still had a bunch of daemons running when I rebooted.

Next, the RPM hell is bad enough. Half of the RPMs need lists of dependencies so long that installing the latest version of the Gimp would be an all day project... Even worse, where do you find the dependencies? If you're lucky they're on the CD, but most packages on there are outdated, so then you look on the internet at rpm search sites. So, you download the rpm (if you were lucky enough to find it -- I couldn't on several occasions) and install it only to find that IT needs dependencies too!

Third is the amount of bloat that gets installed. With Gentoo, I have the comfort of knowing everything that's going on with my system because everything is low level. Mandrake on the other hand hides everything from the user with fancy point and click GUIs (remind you of any other OS?), generated config files that editing would mess up the whole system, and other rigged up applets such as the Mandrake Control Panel or the Mandrake Menu Editor. A good analogy would be Mandrake being a smoke screen between you and your PC. Personally, I can't stand that. Also, who needs both KDE and GNOME?! And have you ever tried recompiling the kernel? I mean not everyone needs legacy SCSI bus support or drivers for every ethernet card on the market... Well, if you attempt this risky venture with Gentoo, you configure, compile, copy, and reboot, and everything's fine. With Mandrake, I've heard so many tales of people (experienced Linux users) breaking the whole distro that way that I'm too afraid to even try it.

Well that was my Mandrake experience. It was a good distro to learn all of the cool software included or to play Frozen Bubble, but anything past that when one becomes a serious Linux user, a low level distro such as Gentoo is the way to go.

tfunk · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 67

Just my $0.02...

I switched off of Mandrake 9.2 to Gentoo for my server (web and database mostly)

I got very tired of RPMDrake mirrors always being screwed up and the fourms (I am a "Silver" member so I have the "member's only" access to them) being full of jerks.

I tried MDK 10, but I couldn't make it play nice (this was their beta release though, not the official, so it may be fixed now)

Anyway...everything was ok with Mandrake setting it up and running it, but the support was terrible and the ftp mirrors always being screwed up was a deal breaker for me...You can't have broken update mirrors when you need to apply a security patch to a production server.

I like mandrake and think it is a decent desktop linux....I just don't think I'll ever look to it for servers again.

Finally...

After using Gentoo for about 2 months now, I have to say it's great! I didn't even install KDE or any other desktop. I love how intuitive everything is and how many great people are here in the fourms.

I've yet to run accross a problem that took more than a few hours to research and implement a fix for.

Take it for what it's worth, but that's my $0.02 =)

Tfunk

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

I myself switched from Mandrake to Gentoo. Mandrake was filled with "dependency hell" and I just didn't feel like I was taking a big enough part in the operation of it. Also, the clunky GUI's weren't great to me. However, popping open an aterm and typing in some commands is really natural to me and it feels better for some reason. I mean, look how I took the screenie in my post. lol

Mikessu · Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 9:14 pm Post subject:

Well I think Mandrake is very good for beginners (except that depency hell that may happen). Only thing I don't like about it is that it seems to contain lots of bugs (graphical network setup is terrible and Windows users dont bother using console). And well.. and I don't like Mandrake theme either. It's not awful but it could be better. For example SuSE Linux has pretty nice looking default theme in KDE and Gnome. And Mandrake ads in Konqueror are also very annoying. You can always remove them... but they will come back.

blatch · Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 11:29 pm Post subject:

Deebster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 126

oanjao · n00b Joined: 19 Feb 2004 Posts: 73 Location: Orlando, FL

I had Mandrake 6 and 7 a few years ago and found it to be a major nuisance after the first few months. Yes, the installer was great and everything had a GUI frontend. I think we have to give the Mandrake guys a lot of credit for setting a higher standard for beginner-friendliness. Unfortunately that wore off real fast when I realized that upgrading Mandrake RPM's was much less convenient than upgrading RedHad RPM's. Mandrake had custom versions of every RPM imaginable, called *-mdk.*.rpm When I wanted to upgrade Netscape Navigator (this was back in the day, I remind you) I couldn't just download an RPM. No, I couldn't install navigator-x.1.i386.rpm because it depended on netscape-core.i386.rpm and I had netscape-core-mdk.i386.rpm Basically, Mandrake had so many custom files that I had to wait for Mandrake to get around to making RPM's before I could upgrade things. I don't know if it's still like this, but you've been warned!
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WaterSoul · Apprentice Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 158

can8dn · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 11:24 pm Post subject:

can8dn · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 11:27 pm Post subject:

numerodix · l33t Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 743 Location: nl.eu

I hear a lot of people love their mandrake but I never thought that much of it. I tried two versions, 9 and 10-test, both were unstable and generally inferior to suse 9 which was also not perfect. I take Fedora Core 2 over the three of them.
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WaterSoul · Apprentice Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 158

Actually, I don't like Mandrake the same way I don't like KDE.

I don't really know why, didn't really have any bad experiences(but don't want so).

lightvhawk0 · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 388

click click click click
/me can't discerne windows user from mandrake
error

Really though I don't like gui installs, ever since gentoo I'll never go back.
But for the avarage shmo Drake isn't that bad.
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pestilence · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 6:59 am Post subject:

I used to be a Redhat used and after a while a Mandrake user...my main problem was that RPM Hell and the long term death of Linux speed...i started searching around for a distro that would have Slackwares hardcore face and a Debian package management...i stumbled upon Gentoo and that was it...it's the best distro i ever run on my systems...its the best package management i have ever seen on Linux systems (haven't tryed Debian though)...i am very happy that finally i have a distro that doesn't leave me around files lying without knowing if they should be there...and a distro that has so many packages available and with the power of an idea such as portage...i don't need anything...i just need to emerge -s or emerge -puU to check out what is needed...no need to be running around web sites and checking for updates...
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charlieg · Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2004 4:00 pm Post subject:

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Arthur Vandelay · n00b Joined: 09 Jan 2003 Posts: 55

Yea sure, that's what they all say. You'll be back.

andrewy · l33t Joined: 07 Apr 2004 Posts: 602

To be honest, I'm not sure what you see in Mandrake that makes it so great. I've used Mandrake, RedHat/Fedora, Debian, and Gentoo, and I think Mandrake was possibly my least favorite of the bunch. The fact that the other distros don't have portage is a more than good enough reason to not use them, in my opinion. The only thing that I like about Mandy/Fedora is the fact that binaries are fast, and that they're good at autoconfiguring everything. But that's the great thing about Linux - everyone can try out many different distros and choose the one that suits them best.