Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Operating system news, in one of the projects I am involved with we are switching over from one version of Linux (Mandriva, formerly Mandrake), to another - Ubuntu.
Why? Well, Mandrake was never perfectly smooth around the edges, especially when it came to upgrades. And the last upgrade was a dreadful experience and left the guinea-pig PC in question limping along with several annoying problems that the previous version didn't have. To finish off the "push" factors, Mandriva's customer support is terrible - it seems they have spent all their energy on merging Mandrake (France) and Conectiva (Brazil), and sending endless promotional emails instead of listening to their customers. I am a paid-up member of their "club", for about USD80 a year, but my several posts and emails asking for help went unanswered.
So we went for Ubuntu as a putative replacement, and it seems to be running along nicely so we are going to roll it out to several other machines, including a spyware-crippled windows box. What were the pull factors? Firstly, it aims to be an easy-to-install version - something which Mandriva claimed but never quite acheived in my view (an install which switches off your network card for no reason does not count in my book!). Secondly, it has received a lot of good crits. Thirdly, it is made round the corner in South Africa, which means there are quite a lot of Ubuntu-savvy people just across the border.
Why? Well, Mandrake was never perfectly smooth around the edges, especially when it came to upgrades. And the last upgrade was a dreadful experience and left the guinea-pig PC in question limping along with several annoying problems that the previous version didn't have. To finish off the "push" factors, Mandriva's customer support is terrible - it seems they have spent all their energy on merging Mandrake (France) and Conectiva (Brazil), and sending endless promotional emails instead of listening to their customers. I am a paid-up member of their "club", for about USD80 a year, but my several posts and emails asking for help went unanswered.
So we went for Ubuntu as a putative replacement, and it seems to be running along nicely so we are going to roll it out to several other machines, including a spyware-crippled windows box. What were the pull factors? Firstly, it aims to be an easy-to-install version - something which Mandriva claimed but never quite acheived in my view (an install which switches off your network card for no reason does not count in my book!). Secondly, it has received a lot of good crits. Thirdly, it is made round the corner in South Africa, which means there are quite a lot of Ubuntu-savvy people just across the border.
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