What should I expect to encounter from Mandriva?

October 23, 2008 12:10 PM

Need some advice from Mandriva and Ubuntu users.

I've been using Mint (Ubuntu + codecs, more or less) for a little over a year now and while I am for the most part happy with it, I just tried the live CD of Mandriva One (Gnome) and am very impressed by its speed and slickness. Even my wireless was detected on the live CD.

Before I make this transition, I'd like to hear from some Mandriva users - especially those who transitioned from Ubuntu - what sort of obstacles they encountered. How do the two distros differ? What sort of pros/cons do you see between the two?

Keep in mind I use my machine for relatively simple desktop stuff - browsing, writing, watching movies, listening to music, etc. I'm not hosting a server or anything.

Thanks

posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I've never used Mandriva, but I am an involved user of Ubuntu. By the end of this month, the next version of Ubuntu is due out.
As far as comparisons go, here's a somewhat outdated comparison. I feel it's important to note that a lot things can change within a year in Ubuntu. Sometimes this fixes bugs, sometimes it introduces them.

The big differences will be:
RPM instead of DEB and associated package management tools
Smaller set of distro available packages
different versions of software. you can use distrowatch to compare versions between major packages in distros.
posted by pwnguin at 2:25 PM on October 23, 2008

Mandriva vs. Ubuntu.

I haven't used Mandriva, but I've used Ubuntu, and one of the big strengths of Ubuntu is the size of the userbase.

Ubuntu is easy to set up to begin with, but it's very well supported, and there are tons of blog and forum posts written by Ubuntu users out there. Chances are, if you do have a problem, someone else has already written about it and hopefully solved the issue.
posted by swift at 2:33 PM on October 23, 2008

Please keep in mind that switching to an RPM package architecture means that you may have substantially more problems with installs as RPM does not have the dependency resolution tools available with APT/DEB. (I could be out of date, but I used to run RH, pre-Fedora.)
posted by Samizdata at 4:37 PM on October 23, 2008

I came in here to echo Samizdata -- managing things like software packages, dependencies, etc. is just so much easier in Ubuntu. The latest Mandriva is not bad at it, but the way apt/synaptic works in Ubuntu is just so much more elegant (read: hassle-free) than rpms and yum.

I actually found Mandriva to be a bit bloated. For speed and ease, I prefer Xubuntu, especially since things like my wireless worked well.
posted by spiderskull at 6:34 PM on October 23, 2008

RPM distros have since adopted dependency resolution tools. When I briefly tried Fedora, I discovered that apt-rpm was available and usable. A lot of distros seem to be moving to a tool called "smart" that does dependency resolution with less RAM than yum ever did. I'm not clear what Mandriva One has, but there's likely to be something comparable to apt-get.

Meanwhile, PackageKit is moving to make the UI elegant across distros, although I have some misgivings about it's ability to truly unite. They've pursued one use case at the expense of all others, and have met resistance from Debian developers who feel that PackageKit is dictating terms to them (and rightly so!).

So like I said, a year is long enough for comparisons to become stale. Anyone complaining about dependency resolution in RPM is giving bad advice.
posted by pwnguin at 11:57 AM on October 24, 2008

OK, so I installed Mandriva 2009 and am incredibly happy with it. It's slicker, runs faster and just makes more sense for me. Most of it was pretty intuitive where it was dissimilar. Compiz is running a lot better, without using significantly more RAM (about 6% to about 8%). I appreciate the input from all the Ubuntu users who, although they hadn't tried Mandriva, are happy with Ubuntu - I'd been using an Ubuntu-based distro for over a year, after all. In the end I thought it best to dive in and I'm glad I did. Thanks again.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:49 PM on October 24, 2008