Wow, nice to see somebody from Twente NL, from Debian stronghold ;-) On Monday 17 November 2003 21:31, Simon Oosthoek wrote:
> CRM == Customer Relationship Management??? Yes. > I don't know if that is such an important matter, compared to some other > problems Mandrake has (not talking about the financial matters, even) Part of CRM is to find out what drives customer loyalty and satisfaction and use the model to maintain and improve business. This what Deno did even not being CRM specialist, simply because he could intuitively deeply feel such things. Unfortunately Deno is back in Vienna and not anymore with Mandrake. (Big mistake in my opinion...) We all feel absence of Deno because there is no sufficient replacement in company (with all regards to people working there). For example, in Deno times it probably would not be possible to have _all_ mirror definitions for urpmi on club www pages *broken* for such a long time as it is now. > For me I'd say these were the priorities I'd like to see: > - work on almost any hardware or say it won't work during install. (I'm not > talking about LG's faults) I cannot worry about that with Mandrake. I think that hardware recognition and use is one of strong aspects of Mandrake Linux. LG scandal is IMHO simply bad luck - "shit happens" as we all know. Nobody can test all combinations of hardware components. After all LG has agreed it's their fault, and these dead drives are quite easily repairable. (I have one too :) Otherwise I have sometimes wondered what strange "hardware zoo" combinations are nevertheless correctly recognized by Mandrake installation. Well, I normally use PowerPack which has more drivers than download edition. > - Consistent configuration and hardware management tools These things get really better from version to version, except some quick decisions like with kdm... > - have one well tested desktop management system (KDE) that doesn't show > any obvious flaws noticable by average users Now this depends mostly from KDE people ;-) I do not know who is to blame about disappearing KDE 3.1.3 menus in MDK 9.2, but this is *major* source of disappointment and certainly very annoying behavior. At the moment my KDE has stopped to display active programs on tasklist, despite all checkmarks correct in KDE Control Center... <sigh>. > - make sure basic applications are thoroughly tested for quality, stability > and performance Agree. That would be Good Thing. However good QC is expensive. Total QC is unreachable even for very big companies because of almost unpredictable human side of interaction with these applications. (Somehow I often manage to get very strange crashes and errors on windows machines I sometimes have to use at work... ;-) However, basic level of QC should involve at least confidence that all apps can be launched and start to work. My 4-year old grandson discovered yesterday that TuxRacer doesn't work anymore (in 9.2 with all current updates) and was very, very sad about that. Thanks God that at least Frozen Bubble was still OK ;-) > - security updates and installation sources are stable Agree. At least there _are_ security updates for Mandrake and they are mostly available. At least after some delay after e-mail announcing them... > Everything else is of course very important too, but when the basics are > more stable, the whole system is more tolerant for whatever else gets > installed. "Let it be, let it be..." :-) Harijs
