If you have read the article from Frederic, divorce is consummated, you can only fear for the future of Mandriva Linux. Indeed, the management of Mandriva mentions absolutely no point in its speeches in the press and it’s a safe bet that it sees no future in the Linux desktop and therefore there will devote no resources.
Therefore, the question of the sustainability of my Mandriva, which is installed on my computer arose. At a time when Ubuntu is already offering the beta of its forthcoming 10.10, Fedora announces its for late September, openSuse begin working on its future 11.4, even Debian is working on its next distribution – Squeeze – on Mandriva side it is a heavy silence. The latter is of no surprise anyway, Edge-IT is in liquidation, there is no internal ressource to Mandriva to propose a roadmap for a possible 2011, and less to achieve it. As Frédéric well recalled, “Edge-IT was the heart of Mandriva, since most of the « Mandriva employees » were actually employees of Edge-IT ” and without heart no distribution, QED!
This report done and especially accepted, being probably more difficult to accept, what to do? As a user I see only one choice: change. Yes, but change to what? The offer is both huge and limited. Huge as a vast horizon has now opened to me, ranging from Windows, why not, to many Linux distributions and even to PC-BSD which has a tremendous asset to the user base that I am able to install windowsmodelike software through pbi. But the supply seems limited, Windows? I have version 7 on a computer and if it works pretty well, this is not the ideal paradigm. Other Linux distributions? I tested – superficially – some regularly but I always come back to Mandriva for its simplicity and it was also the last that I know best. PC-BSD? Pbi system is fantastic for all novices especially from Windows, but there are some shortcomings including the lack of a control center to administer the system. There is the possibility of not having a computer …
The only remaining possibility is a fork from the community. After all, if Mandriva is not interested in desktop Linux, let’s those interested in this project take control themselves without expecting anything in Mandriva. This could be the opportunity to flatten the organization and create synergies between talented developers, contributors and users. Muny has launched a survey on the French forum of Mandriva, “if you were to change your distribution” the discussion have became more extensive since early September (from page 8 of the topic). There are reflection on the life cycle, the very foundation of the distribution, release dates fixed or rolling, misunderstanding between developers and users, and so on.
Is it not possible to use these reflections to start a new distribution project?
That is the question I want to ask the entire community. That is the question I aks to the community!
I am sure there is a future for Linux to the desktop. That future can only be achieved by an alliance between all project stakeholders, from developer to the end user regardless of the skill they have. I want to stress this last point because I believe that future Linux distribution is the result of both the work of developers and others, they write the documentation for the end user, they make Video tutorials, they are working on the graphics, the look, they promote the distribution, and so on.
If a fork is resolved, I hope the organization to be set up to make room for each actor so that the distribution that will emerge will meet the needs of each user whether to develop, surf the Internet, manage a server, do video editing, and so forth.
Are you ready?
I think too many are burying Mandriva before it’s dead. Have you read this? https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=60936#c11
What Laprevote says makes a lot of sense. There is no market for Linux desktops in Europe, we’ve known it for a long time and from a financial perspective it has been a disaster to have kept so many developers in France when the same work could be done for a fraction of the price overseas. It’s not an easy decision to accept for everyone involved but this is the sanest one in a long time. It’s either that or they kill the desktop version, it’s really a shame they haven’t done it 3 years ago because by now they would have been much closer to balancing the books while having all the overseas developers up to speed. I’m not saying Mandriva will make it but at last this is a step in the right direction if the distro is to survive. One feels sorry for the french developers of course, they deserved so much better given the quality of their work. It will be a bumpy ride for the distro which may still die in the end but at least it’s not the last official release.
As for a fork there’s already Unity Linux, it would be a lot of waste if the efforts were duplicated.
Commentaire par Matt — 10 septembre 2010 @ 3 h 04 min