Mandrake’s crippleware

I don’t think I’ve ever been as disappointed by a Linux distribution as I was by the download version of Mandrake’s latest version of its Linux package (10.1, Community version). The impression I’ve got is that it’s “crippleware” – a trial version of a piece of software with important components removed, in order that the customer will then buy the full price version.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they stated this clearly on the website. I left my computer on last night to download three CD images from a source in Sweden. Our broadband connection gives us 15 gigabytes per month, and a CD image is between 600 and 700 megabytes each. Why they don’t compress the image is a mystery to me (this is what Sun did for its Solaris package which I downloaded last week). Of course, I don’t pay for the download and Mandrake don’t profit. But it would not cost them much to tell us what’s missing in advance.

My main interest is software development, in particular, Qt windowed application development. To do this you need a set of entirely freely available programs, but they don’t bother to bundle this with the download. They do provide OpenOffice, thoughtfully, so that anyone seeking a free desktop system can find it here!

The thing I don’t get is that developers tend to be more savvy than general home users, and they know that you can get a system for development for free. If I can’t get a usable development system for free from Mandrake, I can get one from Fedora, or Slackware, FreeBSD … or any number of other places. If Mandrake’s position is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, fine. Just tell us before we waste our bandwidth on your download.