After trying Kubuntu Intrepid, I’m not sure anymore how great the Mandriva KDE 4 implementation really was. It was the first KDE 4.1.2 I tried, and I’m beginning to think that is where the magic was.

Kubuntu 8.10 has been every bit as fast, and rock-solid.

I say that with absolute honesty too! It was nice meeting you. Honestly, I knew part-way through the weekend it probably wasn’t going to work out. I was hesitant to jump ship too quickly, because I really wanted it to work out, however there were a few things that kept coming up that I simply wasn’t able to overcome. To everyone at Mandriva, I do think you all put out a nice distro, and I look forward to keeping up with your progress, and I’ll surely check out 2009.1, but honestly, after getting past the KDE 4 bling you initially provided me, I simply wasn’t comfortable. It was kinda like staying at a hotel - it’s nice for a while, but after a few days you just wanna go home!

Here are some of the issues I ran into:

First - from the time I first installed, something weird was going on with your mirrors. I have a 10+ Meg pipe here at my house, and my net install took 3 hours to complete - probably because I was downloading from a European mirror. I didn’t complain at the time, because I figured since it was release day, all off the mirrors were not synced up yet, and what mirrors were on-line, I assumed, were getting hit pretty hard.

THIS would have been OK - I can understand something like that. The situation got worse, however, instead of better as the weekend went on. Part of this was my fought, part of it wasn’t. To start with, I think I screwed up my mirror-list by trying to get more localized mirrors on there. I then read that I should remove all the sources, and just add them back with the automagical button. This did not work - Error 1. I then read that I should do it with “Easy URPMI” - well, it gave me Cooker repo’s that I had been using unknowingly. Finally, I was able to manually add them back from the command line, but it kept defaulting to some butt-slow mirror in Germany. Hey, I’m in the US, why can’t I use kernel.org? They are a Mandriva mirror! I get good speeds from there - I don’t get good speeds from Germany. I then kept reading that in previous versions of Mandriva you could manually select which mirrros that you want, but this ‘feature’ was removed and ‘improved’ with a process that automatically selected the best mirror for you. Well, news-flash Mandriva guys, it doesn’t work - put it back the way it was! In short what ended up happening was I couldn’t install ANYTHING - I kept getting that stupid “Error 1″. I simply wanted to edit a text file, in my favorite CLi editor, nano (which I’m still shocked wasn’t installed by default), and I couldn’t install it. “Error 1″. I’m beginning to think “Error 1″ was installing Mandriva in the first place!

Secondly, in several areas, there were quite a few areas that lacked professionalism. I noticed misspelled words and grammatical errors in a couple of places, and anywhere that the release was being criticized there were people coming back with “The Mandriva Dev team is overworked - it’s so small!” “Our KDE Team is very small” (I thought you were a KDE distro? Was I wrong???), “We knew there were problems but we released anyway”. IMHO there was a little too much of this. Some of the things I read on the official forums, and in the IRC room were more akin to something I would expect from a small “one-man” distro, not a big company like Mandriva. Huge lack of professionalism in my opinion (but again, this is just my opinion).

Most of the community people I’ve seen seem friendly, but often overly pushy or defensive of the distro. Adam W. comes to mind (I’m seriously not trying to offend you Adam). But, Adam, you show up everywhere the word Mandriva is mentioned on the internet, and put in your $0.02. Often, I don’t think you fully read the context of what you are commenting on (perhaps because you’re the only one trying to read all of the reviews for Mandriva - you are an employee - correct?). I personally found your comment on my blog regarding the Server Kernel being installed by default very unprofessional. You clearly didn’t read what I had written - you simply scanned it, and then fired off a comment basically giving me the impression that you didn’t think I knew what I as talking about, and Mandriva couldn’t do anything wrong. After I corrected you, finally you replied that “Oh, yeah. That IS a bug - it was fixed once but we broke it again before release - I don’t know why really”. That doesn’t sound professional for me.

This overall lack of professionalism (and integrity) is what turned me off to Mandriva the last time I tried it. Let’s have story time

A while back, there was a magazine (I can’t remember which one) which had the 2008.0 Mandriva Power Pack on the cover. I thought that was a great deal, however after I bought the magazine, I was told by you, Adam W. on your forums that I couldn’t have any of the proprietary software that came with the Powerpack because that wasn’t in the agreement with the Magazine. So, if so, why let the Magazine “advertise” the Powerpack, $59 Value? I didn’t get a $59 value, I lost the $15 I paid for the magazine, and I got nothing more than I could have gotten with Mandriva One (I couldn’t even get x86_64 media!

I gave Mandriva a ton of publicity this weekend on my blog, and I only hope that you fix many of the problems currently in the final release since I know over 3,000 people read of me recommending your software - I don’t want my readers to have a bad experience. I fully expect the entire Mandriva flock to descend on my blog and comment away, but I was pretty ticked off this afternoon when I couldn’t install a simple application.

Someone was looking out for me tonight, however. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do - but on a whim I downloaded the “daily-live” build of Kubuntu Intrepid - burned it, said a prayer and rebooted. Finally, after weeks of trying X started on my system. I went through the install, and although I don’t yet have fglrx, I have X and everything is running nicely on the open-source ATI driver. Call me a fanboy if you want, but (K)Ubuntu is the best Desktop distro out there (and becoming the best Server Distro, imho), and even in pre-release stage Kubuntu 8.10 is very polished and professional. Jonathan Riddell and team have done a great job with this release so far, it’s just that due to ATI, this is the first I’ve been able to see of it. I’m not sure what changed, or what got updated, but finally it works, and I can ride it out to RTM. Ubuntu/Kubuntu might not have the fancy control center, but at least I understand how it works, and how to fix it if it breaks. Also, there is absolutely the largest and most helpful community surrounding it if I do run into something that doesn’t work.