Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition

I was suffering from a touch of boredom so I decided to download the cd images for the free version of Mandrake 10.0 and give it a try. Before this test run I had not touched Mandrake since the 9.0 days. Back then I compared Mandrake 9.0 against a newly released Red Hat 8.0 and Red Hat won my heart. Mandrake was simply too buggy and unpolished and the new Bluecurve interface won me over.

The following are my observations (which were written in a hurry for a Blog and not a magazine so please excuse the informal grammar and random spelling mistakes):

Installer Problems

Problems burning the CDs:

Apparently you need a CD burner capable of burning 80 minute CDs… something my older drive can’t do. This isn’t really a big negative these days but it is not a problem I have encountered before with cd images for other distributions and operating systems. (As a workaround I simply burned the 8mb network install cd image and used HTTP installation.)

Network Problems:

If you don’t specify a DNS server or specify an invalid one then the installer hangs. I waited about two minutes and then gave the system the old three finger reboot salute. A DNS server should not be required for a network install if the remote server is local and you know it’s IP. I could live with this problem if there was only some clue on the screen that it is hanging while testing networking settings or similar. There is literally nothing on the screen except for a copyright notice. I would not have guessed the source of the problem if I wasn’t already experienced in dealing with Linux and networking issues in general.

The actual package installation phase is too quiet except for some obnoxious ads:

I’d like to know at least what package is being installed (for diagnostic reasons in case of a hang) when it is being installed. Also I would like to request that someone get the Dr. Web people to hire a graphic artist. Their ad looks horrible. So horrible I count it as a negative against Mandrake. (Yes, I’m a negative person.)

“gstreamer-oss” errored out during installation:

A minor problem installing a package. I’m not sure if the bug was a side effect of my environment or simply something that didn’t get QA’d properly. I’d ignore this problem if it were my only one but it wasn’t.

The configuration screen during install doesn’t seem very user friendly:

The main configuration overview screen during the installer and the wizards you can invoke from it suffer from minor issues throughout. They can be confusing at times and show a slight lack of polish in a few areas. YaST suffers from similar UI design brain damage. While I prefer Red Hat’s Anaconda I must note that even it still asks too many questions and suffers from its own problems.

The update tool dies horribly:

Mandrake includes the ability to patch your system using the install. This is a nice idea (Red Hat’s equivalent is to offer to run up2date in “firstboot”) but it didn’t work for me. I selected a mirror, it connected to the mirror, then the tool spewed a confusing error message at me and moved on to the next step in the installer. There was no back button or any way to click on the step name to get back to the mirror list and try again (or get back to any other previous step for that matter).

Problems after installation

The GDM defaults are horrible:

Predictably if you didn’t select to install the entire KDE desktop environment during install GDM is the default. I would normally be happy with this but the default configuration sucks. It uses one of default GNOME themes with icons that don’t match and has spacing problems with the login box and fonts. The default session is IceWM. Yes, IceWM that looks like fvwm emulating Windows 95. Why the hell is IceWM the default?!

The Galaxy II theme sucks:

Apparently no one learned a thing from Bluecurve, SuSE’s equivalent, Mac OS X, Windows XP, or any other UI look before. The circular window buttons suck. They look horrible. The white to blue gradiant at the top of window borders sucks. Hard. The icons are uninteresting and lack the “feel” found in Bluecurve, Mac OS X, etc. Icon “feel” is a hard thing for me to describe (maybe I should try in the future) but whatever it is this theme did not have it. Mandrake also decided to commit the same crime that makes me cringe at the sight of most KDE themes. Why the hell do people try to take square buttons and incorrectly use shadows and horrible corner rounding to try to make them look “3D”? And the effect that happens when you press them screams “I LOVE MOTIF!!!!”. Those buttons are to UI design as too much mascara and eye liner is to an ugly woman. DON’T DO IT!

The update tool doesn’t work:

No matter what FTP mirror I specified the damn update tool would error out with multiple useless error dialogs before presenting me with an empty update list. If I was new to Linux and Mandrake I would have ignored those errors because I didn’t understand them and assumed I didn’t have any updates to apply. Not Good. To an experienced user it’s a pain in the ass as they try to figure out why this tool is barfing and not working with any mirror even though their network settings are correct and ftping to random sites works fine.

Configuration tools are unpolished:

I’m not going to criticize the configuration tools too much. They are significantly better then the tools in 9.0. At least with 10.0 you can tell they had a native english speaker attempt to proofread and spellcheck the tools and a graphic artist to come up with some eye candy. (My spelling is horrible and my grammar sucks but I’m not exactly writing a GUI tool to be used by thousands of people…) My suggestion to the developers of the tools would be this: PLEASE READ THE GNOME HUMAN INTERFACE GUIDELINES. The appropriate place for the first letter of a line of text in a dialog box should not be right up against the window border. Please use white space. Please clean up error dialogs and similar to actually be useful and comprehensible to users. Just read the entire GNOME HIG and take it to heart. UI experts wrote the HIG after months of work. GNOME’s committment to the following guidelines improved it tenfold in my eyes. If you don’t like the GNOME way then read the Windows HIG. Learn something from it.

Menu structure needs to be sent back to the chef:

Too many options in too many submenus going too many levels deep. Multiple programs providing similar functionality with non-descriptive names. The printer menus have 12 different non-descriptive items for various printer configuration tools and drivers. It is the year 2004. I don’t give a rat’s ass about rxvt or xterm. Give me whatever fully functional terminal window that integrates best with my desktop of choice and leave the others out of the menus. (While you are at it, take a look at Fedora’s menus… They are so much more cleaner.)

Bootloader confusion:

Mandrake uses LILO with a graphical boot patch. I’m not a big fan of LILO but I can live with it. Unfortunately the framebuffer fonts it uses are hard to read (at least with my Nvidia card) and it puts useless confusing items in the selection screen. The GUI configuration tool for the bootloader seems missing in action in a GNOME desktop install.

You must install KDE to have a useable desktop:

Some configuration tools seem to be missing if you uncheck KDE during the install even though it still installs various KDE libraries and other KDE using applications. I didn’t see common GNOME applications like sodipodi in the menus and for some reason they installed the long abandoned Gnome Office tools (like gnome-cal, etc) that were not updated since Gnome 1.4. Let them die already.

With a few exceptions (which are minor) Mandrake 10.0 feels like where Red Hat/Fedora and SuSE were two years ago. It feels like an old style distribution with a few pointy objects removed and some polish. I can’t name a single thing I liked in Mandrake compared to Fedora or SuSE except for the fact the Totem media player was installed by default. Thats it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if SuSE did that also these days.

So in summary: If you prefer GNOME then use Fedora. If you prefer KDE then use SuSE. If you are looking for a distribution that treats both desktops well and polishes both with equal effort then keep looking. If you long for the good old days of Linux but you need newer fangled features that are not available in Slackware then use Mandrake. If 2004 is the year of the Linux Desktop it is clear that I will not be looking at Mandrake as the desktop OS of choice on my machines.