Mandrake 8.1 is my first beta testing experience and have been helping since 8.1beta2 and I even went to bed last night thinking of trying another distro on my 2nd computer. When you have a serious bug (I'm not talking show stopper either). For example enlightenment changing to, you have to press the middle mouse button to get the enlightenment menu now and paper icons over the other icons. Then you remember that just in beta3 it was working perfectly and that they are wanting to get to a stable release next week. It is discerning! When a previous release app worked perfectly on your computer and the next doesn't from a fresh install and your bug is marked as invalid, but the problem still exist. You just want to throw up your hands and put something else on.So sprach »Borsenkow Andrej« am 2001-09-22 um 13:37:23 +0400 :Dropping updates for all old releases rigth after the new release
becomes
available is sick. It makes me want to switch to some other distro or
Well, how do the others like RedHat and SuSE do this? Do they have
official updates for old distributions which add functionality and not
just fix security issues?
Alexander Skwar
My main issue is: Newbies don't always have to be handfed, but things do have to remain somewhat consistant, easy to use, not work one time and next update crashs or change your settings completely. People are looking for alternatives to Microsoft. My Dad is an example of this. He has come a very long way, from not knowing computers at all. To helping others, building his own website (handwriten with no editor), I think he is also getting ready to put in his on memory. I have tried to get him to try Linux, but he won't, says he doesn't know enough. Even I have to completely reinstall quite a lot, but I do mess with things. Still most of my crashes are not from messing with thing, but Updates.
For this though I remember that I am beta testing to help bring a stable release to the masses. So I don't complain to much when problems happen here, but it does look to me that this is being rushed and this final release next week is going to be bug ridden and not accomplish the goal of bringing more people to Linux.
I am not a great programmer, don't have the knowledge at this time to maintain any packages, but I am really good at computers. I am trying to do my part to help (website on Mandrake Linux) and beta testing, but it does look like it might be for nought. Hope not!
