On 04/09/10 10:55, Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Ubuntu plus the ubuntu-restricted-extras package takes care of all
> but the most obscure codecs. There won't be many media files that
> you can't just click on and expect to play, and the Ubuntu
> Software Centre offers lots of alternatives to the defaults,
> presented in a much friendlier way than, say, Synaptic.
>
>
> What's Mandriva like? A friend of mine said he installed it for his
> family and they love it? I haven't used Mandrake since... 1999...
> which was, I think, 6.0. But it was very good in those days, for
> personal use.
Hi Stephen,
I went on to Mandrake having started out with Red Hat, the big selling
point being usability and optimisation for Pentium chips at the time.
I recall I got cheesed off with RPMs (no longer an issue) and started
looking for alternatives. A lot of folks on the list were using Debian,
so I gave that a go and hit all of the historical issues around that...
difficult to install, long periods between new versions, etc. As a
result I paid for Libranet, which stagnated a year or so later when the
lead developer died. Looking for an alternative I found the newly
announced Ubuntu (Warty? It was a long time ago!)
Anyway, a friend persisted with Mandrake and Mandriva throughout my
Debian/Libranet/Ubuntu trials until he got really hacked off with the
way the project was managed and switched to Ubuntu, which he has stuck with.
I mention all of this as it has somewhat clouded my judgement. Mandriva
might be an excellent distro, but I see it as having been sidelined
years ago by the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
If you are not much of a desktop user person you will probably find that
there is more help both in here (the list) and out there (forums, etc.)
for Ubuntu than Mandriva, not necessarily because it is better, but just
by sheer weight of numbers and the momentum Ubuntu has built up.
That said, there's almost certainly a live disk you can download so why
not give Manrdiva a go alongside Ubuntu and see what you think?
Sean
--
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www.funkygibbins.me.uk
