Simple
#includeResource("Skel.ArticleHeader") Before (before emacs), life was simple, businessmen didn't care about software, and we could peacefully hack, without bothering about complicated things. Then, after MS-DOS, everything was complex, nobody understood anything anymore, creating a piece of software was just the devil of a job, there were licenses, protections, business plans, schedules, really horrible things. Then, thanks to GNU and Linux, things got a little simpler again, and then it was just a question of coding and publishing everything on the Internet. But some companies decided to distribute free software, to build a business upon that, and that was the beginning of a big mess.
When I arrived at Mandriva, nealy 7 years ago, I thought that everything would be simple, that we'd just to create the distribution, put it on the Internet, people would give us money for that, and we would live forever in a world of harmony and peace.
But if the world was so simple, there would be no need for businessmen and consultants. We'd have to find something else for them to do.
In reality things are complicated even when you're distributing free software. There are schedules, production costs, deadlines, boxes to produce, markets, shares, partners, resellers, contracts, and product cannibalization (surely one of the most complicated things), and, above all, the feedback of our users, often including demands all of which we can't possibly meet at the same time.
And as I am not very interested by margins, revenues, turnover, return on investments, direct and indirect costs (if only the world didn't have so many calculators, we would not have to invent all those complicated things to give them something to do), I prefer listening to people who complain. When there are a lot of them, I say to myself that I must have done something bad, and when they are not so many, I tell myself maybe they didn't try the latest X.org version yet.
I am the 'release manager' for the Consumer product line at Mandriva since Mandrakelinux 7.0, a total of 13 distributions up to 2006. Currently, I am quite embarrassed because I feel a lot of criticism, but I do not really get why. Mandriva One is not so bad, the Mandriva Kiosk was created to satisfy users' requests, 2006 had some bugs, true, but I still think that it is a very good product. We are still working on the Free version and for the 2006 we even released a complete x86_64 Free version (for previous releases there was no Free x86-64 edition, or only a cut-down one disc version), and likely for the 2007 we will also release a Mandriva Free version based on Mandriva One. The Club December edition was quite good, and it seems you liked it, because you are more than 4000 users to have downloaded it, and we even released a DVD version at your request.
I do not participate a lot on the Club, that's true, but Adam is working really well, and he asked me my opinion quite often, and also report me everything that are bothering you, which is really a good thing. Now we are working on the 2007, and soon you will be able to test the first betas, and I will come to discuss with you about what you like and what you do not.
Nothing changes, everything is still simple, I still work for you, with all my team, this is our job, and we still defend the free software spirit, for a better world, and Mandriva will still be a distribution done for you and thanks to you.
Version 1.60 last modified by Titpom on 16/10/2006 at 03:41
Comments (42)
Franchement, à l'utilisation Mandriva est pour moi la meilleur distribution, elle répond pratiquement à toutes mes attentes...
La seule chose, qui fait que malgrès ma pleine satisfaction, je vais de temps en temps essayer d'autres distro… c'est le temps que met Mandriva pour intégré les nouveauté.
KDE 3.5, firefox 1.5, pour ne citer que ça.... et j'avoue que c'est parfois frustrant...
Mais bon.... allez bonne continuation. Je ne regrète pas ma contribution ;-)
Faire simple, c'est effectivement ce que tous ceux qui découvrent Mandriva (et les autres) aimeraient…
Seulement, voilà, met toi à la place de quelqu'un qui veut tester LA Mandriva 2006 FREE, tu vas sur mandriva.com, et là, essaie de télécharger la version free ! C'est quasiment impossible, il faut presque 20 clics !
Maintenant, fais la même chose avec ubuntu, 3 clics et la distrib est en téléchargement !
Alors OUI, il FAUT faire plus simple, c'est VITAL !
Merci
pour le forum français, on se démène comme on peut, mais il est clair que cela n' est pas du niveau du forum anglais grâce à Adam. Je vous présente mes excuses pour ma partie. Désolé.
1) Les sites web
Je suis pas ergonome, mais j'aurais placé les petits liens "store,club,support,mandriva" en haut à gauche, au dessus du logo, parce que c'est là que regarde l'oeil par défaut.
Sur le site web, la page des téléchargement est trop difficile à trouver. Regardons ce que font les 2 projets libres les plus en vue : http://www.openoffice.org/ http://www.mozilla.com/ C'est simple : un gros carré vert avec une flèche vers le bas (symbole du téléchargement)
Dans le club, il y a trop de rubriques. Quelles différences entre Documentation, Base de connaissances et E-training : c'est tout de la doc pour apprendre, non ?
2) La qualité de la distrib
A mon avis, elle est plus qu'honorable. La reconnaissance de (presque) tout le matériel est vraiment une avancé par rapport aux autres distrib (celles avec beaucoup de u), ainsi que la présence d'assistants pour tout configurer.
Pour la 2006, j'ai pas trop aimé l'ajout de kat (100% du CPU, surtout que j'utilise Gnome), ni le passage au Bureau comme répertoire par défaut des shells. D'ailleurs, pour revenir au comportement que je préfère, l'ajout de fichiers cachés m'a semblé "bizarre" (J'aurai préféré une option dans kat pour le désactiver au démarrage). Bien sûr, je parle de mon cas, mais il est a multiplié par le nombre d'install chez des amis (à qui il faut faire créer le fichier, etc...)
3) la relation avec la communauté
Il manquait un lien régulier et personnel avec la communauté. L'idée de Mandriva Linux Inside est bonne, mais j'ai l'impression que vous avez d'autres chat à fouetter. La newsletter est bien, mais pas assez personnelle (ce n'est pas son but).
Dans l'autre sens, j'aimerai aussi voir apparaître une page de wiki recensant les actions qu'un petit contributeur pourrait faire. Autant "Rejoindre cooker" peut paraître énorme et indéfini, autant "Corriger et mettre à jour la page X du wiki" peut sembler simple et rapide à faire pour un nouveau contributeur.
Merci pour l'article.
For the changed release cycle it's much related to the concern of the lack of ability to do the satisfactory amount of qa within only six months.. A lot of people complained about only six months, especially the businiss customers..
Oh well, things should probably improve now and in the future..
Je suis peut-être passé à une autre distrib, mais je n'ai certainement pas tiré un trait sur ma distribution qui reste pour moi la plus attachante : mandriva.
Malheureusement, comme de nombreuses personnes le demandent, que ce soit dans les commentaires de cet article, le forum ou partout ailleurs sur le web, mandriva n'arrive pas à faire quelque chose de SIMPLE.
C'est cocace, car c'est le titre de ton article :) Mais vraiment, ce qu'il manque avant tout à mandriva, c'est la simplicité que l'on peut trouver ailleurs.
Simplicité à propos du site web : les débutants comme les confirmés n'ont pas besoin de X sites différents, de X options, de X abonnements, de X distributions mandriva différentes nommées toutes différemment.
Tout pourrait être à mon avis beaucoup plus simple, donc beaucoup plus compréhensible !
The work that you and the rest of the team at Mandrake/Mandriva have done over the years has been truly appreciated by me. I have had the chance to correspond with you on occasion, and either issues were very quickly resolved, or I was gently educated as to the whys of what the issue was. For both, I thank you. You didn't have to go the extra distance, but you did.
There will always be certain releases that seem to be more stable, and others that at first aren't. Once the bug fixes were in, 2006 has been very stable for me. (And yes, I liked the Christmas Release, and the OO 2.0 packages.)
I like the yearly release cycle. I don't want to upgrade all of my machines every 6 months, especially since there have been some major changes release-to-release that made fresh installs a good idea. I understand that this is one of the things that you are working to improve. Kudos for that. I do like the club.club releases of easily installable new versions of some of the major OS components so that one can experiment if so desired every few months.
I have had the chance to fill up my large new empty hard drive with several other distros over the past several weeks, just to see what all of the talk about some of them was about. It was one of those things a person has to do now and then to help remember why you use your distro of choice over others. The experience reminded me why I switched to Mandrake all those many years ago from Red Hat. Mandriva has a superb installer. It has excellent hardware support (desktop and laptop). Urpmi and RpmDrake are top notch when it comes to handling packages and updates. The desktop is beautiful to look at. The commercial packages available in the PowerPack make the distro even more valuable to me. Things just work out-of-the-box. So thanks Mandriva. Keep up the good work. Keep moving forward. Keep improving the distribution. The reasons I chose Mandrake years ago are still valid for Mandriva today. I use the distro many hours each day and night for typical office work and as a Linux development workstation. I take a minute off now and then to enjoy some multimedia diversions to break up the long days and nights while working. 2006 just works. It's a joy to look at, and it's easy to maintain.
I had the opportunity this week to offer the opportunity to try installing Linux to some co-workers. I had a handful volunteers, and was wanting to see just what kinds of issues a typical M$ user might have in making the switch to Linux on the desktop in a dual-boot situation on an existing machine. I had a handful of distro's install disks and an easy way to roll back the machine to a single M$ boot configuration between tries. Mandriva 2006 won hands down. Getting a fully working installation by the typical M$ user was easy. Web, email, multimedia, all worked. Some other distros didn't deliver on this, and some users couldn't handle other distros installers and didn't finish the install at all. You've got a few new converts that will be downloading a version of Mandriva soon.
As for me, I had no trouble installing any of the distros, but then again I have been in the nix world since 1973. I *can do it the hard way, but who needs the hard way? (I really will give Gentoo a try when I have a few spare weeks, just for fun, and bragging rights.)
From my perspective you've got a distro that a new user can install and maintain, and yet is rich enough to satisfy experienced users. That's the idea isn't it?
I use and develop with Mandriva because I want to, not because I have to. Part of that is the distro itself and part of that is because of the company, the Club, and the community. The bottom line is still that if the distro was unstable, ugly, or hard to use, I'd be somewhere else right now.
So thanks Warly and the rest of the team. I'll continue to look forward to new and exciting things from you.
Il y a 2 hypothèses à partir de là :
Ce qui ne m'empèche pas, en tant qu'utilisateur, membre du club et actionnaire, de continuer à penser que c'est une <<�énorme>> anerie du pt de vue réputation de s'être copieusement faché avec un des fondateurs ! Heureusement finalement que vous (pterjean, anne, et toi par exemple) ramez pour la relever, cette réputation.
I suspect that the original 2006 was perhaps a little rushed. Some of the packages were a little unstable (X.org has been mentioned a lot and I'd agree). The Christmas club edition seems a lot better (even if installing it in March and seeing an Xmas theme seems a little odd).
To get back to the original point, to me the business model of Mandriva (sales of boxed packages plus the club) seems basically sound. Obviously the free download versions make no money and we all understand that someone has to pay for all your good work. Personally I like the idea of my club membership being a sort of subscription to have the latest version and, more importantly, to be a part of the process of developing that version (no matter how small).
This is the key difference between the club and off-the-shelf software. With off-the-shelf commercial software you pay for the box and that's it. No support or whatever. With something like the club we all group together and fund and/or help with the continual process of improvement. It's a process not a product.
Anyway, I think the next year will see some interesting developments. I really hope that the Mandriva team can keep it all together and continue to produce good software.
Keep up the good work!
Jim.
Je vais dans le même sens que ceux qui préconise une simplification du site internet, des ISOs mises à jour.
With the new release cycle, it is natural that people are more demanding about the quality of the distros, since they are around for a full year. Apparently, 2006 was released in a hurry (otherwise these serious bugs would not be present), but the preparation of 2007 should more quiet. You'll just have to relinquish adding brand new packages in the last minute. Those who want brand new stuff will be happy with the Club special editions.
The list we use is:
http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/mirrorsfull.list
what servers on there are not functional, for you?
When Mandriva One Final was released I took it with me to a large Linux event and showed it to a lot of people. Everybody liked the idea of the seamless installer but again everybody told me (in his own words) to come back when I have an updated release with current software.
Last: I was happy to hear that the release cycle was changed to one year. I thought it to be a good chance to have a better quality at release time. And I guess that's what most other users think. So, 2007 has to be the best ever in quality, otherwise Mandriva will really be what a long standing freind of Mandriva wrote in a review of Mandriva 2006: "It's a pity to see a once leading Linux distribution vanish in mediocrity." Hopefully you can prove him wrong in next automn.
Mandriva 2006 run smoothly as a vmware host. But Mandriva 2005 destryed the vm machines running windows xp/nt/2000.
Please, be carefull with mandriva 2007
Ça fait 4 clicks, mais difficile de faire mieux, non ? Il faut bien que Mandriva informe sur ce qu'est le club, la version boîte, etc… ça me semble logique.