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.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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