yea!!
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Mandriva is the new kid on the block. Real classic Linux users will remember Mandrake.
Mandrake was the 2nd distro I tried some 25 years ago.
I first tried a version of red hat that I got from a CD on the cover of a PC magazine back in 1999. I was barely a teenager, didn't know what I was doing, ended up hating it. Then a couple years later I read about Mandrake, again got it from a CD on the front of a magazine. I used it for about a year before hopping to Slackware.
My love hate relationship started with that cd. My dad hated it though because I was screwing up the boot every time.
Same here. I started out on Debian Woody, then decided to try a side install of Mandrake specifically because it was supposed to be the most user-friendly option. I do recall liking the Mandrake experience well enough at the time--but stayed primarily using Debian, because I'm stubborn and rather enjoyed the sense of challenge.
(Also kinda setting the continuing pattern of keeping at least one side distro or OS going to try out. These days, they are more likely to live in VMs though.)
My first around the same time, I couldn't believe something like that was free. Now I'm on Bazzite and I still can't believe it.
I'm not a classic Linuxer (I switched in 2015) but I did once try Mandrake out of historical curiosity. From what I hear it was the recommended "beginner-friendly" distro before Ubuntu came out. And based on how hard it was to get working on a VM, I now understand why classic Linuxers talk about Ubuntu like it was this huge sea change.
Linux was a lot more fun in the old days, but it's a lot more useable now.
It ran fairly well for me out of the box. I think it's similar to trying to run Windows 98/2000/XP on modern VM software, it gets utterly confused and needs very specific hardware configuration to boot. Modern VMs run this good in big part because of paravirtualized hardware.
I think what made Ubuntu so good is a combination of being based on Debian and also being there at the right time when Linux software was getting generally better. When I tried Mandrake it was too early for Wine to run any sort of game, codecs were lacking for video. When I tried Linux again with Ubuntu, there was now VirtualBox and computers fast enough to run that reasonably, graphics drivers were more usable. Compiz was popping off to show off that Xorg could now do compositing like macOS and Vista.
Mandrake was good but limited by what Linux could do back then. Enjoyed it quite a bit but 9 year old me ran back to XP for the games. When I tried Ubuntu I was a bit older and more interested in programming and WoW ran great in Wine, so I managed to stick and have been on Linux since.
My very first distro I believe was Mandrake 10, it's the distro that planted the seed to eventually switch for real with Ubuntu 7.10
... And conectiva.
And they may know how conectiva died, and have sworn off SuSE because of it.
Damn, I didn’t realise I still had that memory until now!
Huh, my first Linux distro was the very same distro and version that the original release of Linux-Mandrake was based on (Red Hat Linux 5.1)
I recall trying Mandrake at some point, but I don't remember when. I might have had it installed on a laptop.
Aah, tho med brain didn't lie to me, good to know!
Mandrake was the first distro I was looking for in a small city, in the third world in the 90s. Couldn't put my hands on those CDs, not even in the one university with some sort of computational engineering career there. I first installed Slackware.