Mandrake 9.0 RC1 Released!

Bugs and all.....

Can I hijack this thread and go off on a little rant about Mandrake's beta practices? Grrrr......

I used to use Mandrake for a long time. I switched to it around 7.0 because I was frustrated with all the bugs and non-standard crap Red Hat was putting in their distro at that time (This was in the ~6.0 RH days). I found Mandrake to be tight and bug-free. I called it a better Red Hat than Red Hat.

But then as time went on and new versions came out, I noticed more and more stuff being broken. By 8.1 it had become so severe that I just couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't even install that version because of a severe SCSI bug that Mandrake were telling everybody wasn't a bug. (Civileme said it was a problem in the new aic7xxx module and not Mdk's fault, but Red Hat used the exact same module and didn't exhibit the problem. When I pointed this out toMdk, they got quiet.) So I went back to Red Hat for a while, and eventually switched to Gentoo.

Here's the problem with Mandrake: They have a fixed release schedule of every 6 months, and they have a set beta pattern of 3 betas, an RC, and release - whether it's ready or not. They release new betas every 2 weeks, and here's the kicker: They don't freeze the packages in their betas. They accept new packages up to RC1. Can anybody tell me the point of having 3 betas if you're going to accept new packages in RC1 and break everything again?

In the 8.2 beta cycle, I personally submitted no less than a dozen showstopping bugs, but only a handful got fized because they were too busy getting the next beta ready to go out the door to actually fix any bugs. 1-2 weeks is NOT long enough to fix as many bug reports as they get. I don't think they're really interested in fixing bugs.

Here's what I'd like to see for Mandrake: 1) Cut back to 1 release a year. Every 6 months is too rushed. 2) Start using a proper beta cycle with that lasts longer than 6 weeks, and don't release new betas until they are ready. Freeze the packages at beta 1. 3) The package freeze means that Mandrake won't be as bleeding edge as they have been, so they will need to start offering better package updates. Currently, they don't offer any feature upgrades to their releases. Only bug fixes and security updates. Start putting new versiona of Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE on the update list.

I just get irritated because Mandrake could be so good if they would just cool their jets and do some serious QA work. I have always believed that Mandrake was the best hope Linux has for breaking into the desktop market, but people aren't going to use a buggy, broken distro. If they want that, they'll stick to Windows.

OK.... I'm through ranting now. We now return you to your regularly scheduled AntiOnline programming. :D