I have been diligently following the ongoing discussions about future directions, marketing approaches and technical support, most definitely the insightful exchanges with Frank Griffin and Graham Lauder.
As briefly as possible, I'd like to suggest that some of us are perhaps losing sight of what we really have with the existing Mandriva distro as a jumping off point. I spent a good portion of September installing and re-installing several distros from scratch to see for myself where they stood. (I was running a bit scared, I'll admit, so it was due diligence to ensure I had a plan B were Mandriva to disappear.) For my development work in counselling psychology, I use a server to provide our own sendmail, apache, php and postgresql services. But I ALSO use the GNOME desktop not just for the usual mail traffic and web browsing but as the front-end for all the web development tools we also utilize. This makes a lot of sense in my case, true, but also for small business generally. It is the simple, if not ideal, combination of the desktop with a server as such. Mandriva never had a problem with that. Seems to me, with the exception of commercial game-playing stuff, I come close to having 'all things for all people'. You can't do this easily or directly with Open Suse, nor with Fedora. I suspect that is because both are subtly laid out to ensnare you in a money upgrade. Mandriva, by way of contrast, selects and updates a kernel-server for my needs. No fuss, no muss. At the time, neither of those distros had a FUNCTIONING equivalent to our cooker. Fedora is all business and has heaps of documentation support but I found it easier to work with the command line. Open Suse, on the other hand, has endless detailed menus which, I suppose, is an attempt to look like Windows. Impressed initially by the scope of what was available, I quickly became lost in the visual congestion. I'm the kind of guy who finds it far, far easier to write some script for rsync backups rather than deal with the tedious and not overly transparent form-filling required by luckybackup, by way of example. I'm not a script fiend, I just like a natural choice between gui and command line. Mandriva has always inherently provided me with that. I spent considerable time trying to be objective about Ubuntu, but I admit to having been heavily biased by negative reviews of Ubuntu as a server. I also installed BSD and, if I had to stop at this point and Mageia were not to become reality, then that is where I would go. Kind of felt like the old UNIX days, but there was something else I learned from a rather non-productive month. When we are successful forking Mageia as a community, we will have removed the manipulative, hidden agendas of SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu. We will have the best opportunity to fulfill the original dream behind what is now Linux. As is so often the case in human history, the tools we already have in our toolbox are just waiting to be made use of. The present world has become so cynical that it cannot conceive of something 'free' having any value. That is one of the unintended results of aggressive marketing. Yet in the end real value, as opposed to monetary value will stand the test of time. Linux, is still 'a kid'. Lets show this 'kid' the mature patient nurturing it needs to reach even some of its astonishing potential. At all costs, let us all endeavour NOT to repeat recent history still again. My best to all ... George
