I just wanted to express a sincere thank-you to everyone on this list. From
the developers, to the long time subscribers, and even the newbies. You all
have helped me in incredible ways to learn, adopt, and embrace the GNU/Linux
environment.
I installed Linux Mandrake for the first time about a year and a half ago, I
think version 7.0. Previous to that I was using SuSE 6.3. I was a total
newbie and asked a lot of annoying questions. At that time, Linux Mandrake
blew me away. It was easy to install, easy to work with, fun to play with,
but best of all the information I could pick up from the newbie and expert
lists was amazing. I religiously read through every email, even if it didn't
apply to me, so I could learn more about the amazing features of a
Linux-based operating system.
But times they are a changing. Mandrake is aiming their distribution at
newbies - a great idea! That said, I disagree with Mandrake's direction of
releasing a cutting edge distro aimed for newbie use. 8.0, although it has a
lot of bells and whistles, was rushed but is unstable and frustrating to use.
Cutting edge is nice, but some serious QA needs to be done IF your target
audience is the newbie crowd.
Developers, think about your first experiences with Linux. What did you like
about it so much? I am willing to bet that one of the top reasons was
stability. It doesn't crash. And everything "works".
If I were a newbie and installed Linux Mandrake my first impression would be
"Wow, that was easier to install than I thought it would be." And I would
probably be impressed with the way things worked. I would not be impressed,
though, with the bugs that are shipped. I would not be impressed with how the
software update feature didn't work properly right out of the box. I would
also not be impressed with how a seemingly innocent update would wreck my
working environment. I'm talking about the recent kdelibs update.
Some serious QA needs to happen if you plan to release a distro aimed at the
newbie crowd. Otherwise you risk turning them away from Linux completely if
things don't work right. The beta was frozen for what, two or three days
before the official release? Thats not right. There are too many kinks in
Mandrake 8.0 to make it release quality. A month from final beta to release
candidate would have solved a lot of them.
Not being a newbie anymore and feeling disgruntled after the release of
Mandrake 8.0 I have removed it from my system and have installed a different
distribution, one more aimed at experts. I haven't been this happy since I
installed Mandrake 7.0. I have all the bells and whistles (plus more) that
Mandrake 8.0 has and more stability than I am used to.
Once again, thanks to everyone for helping learn this operating environment.
Its a big change from Windows, but man, is it worth it.
-Chris
