[NTLUG:Discuss] A 'Halfway' Distribution

[Mike]

On Friday 24 January 2003 01:29 am, Greg Edwards wrote:
> What was your issue with Mandrake 9?  I'm running 8.2 and
> I won't upgrade until at least 9.1.
It's really a matter of opinion for me. Mandrake is designed 
for linux newbies, and I'm starting to feel restricted in 
it. There is nothing wrong with 9.0, it's just a sum of 
teeny things that makes me feel there has to be other 
distro's better suited to me. I still strongly recommend it 
for people with no linux experience, and those forced to 
deal with a windows interface on a daily basis. Mandrake 
still does the best job of putting stuff in locations that 
make sense to windows users. Corel WAS better than 
Mandrake, but they (now @ http://www.xandros.net ) want 
99.00 and don't offer a downloadable ISO.  I do a lot of 
speculative buying, but I'm not rich enough to spend that 
much just to try something. 

There were just too many little things missing in mandrake 
9.0 for me vs. mandrake 8.0   Alot you won't notice right 
away or care about: stuff like the 4 screensavers vs 30+ in 
mandrake 8 is annoying, but not really an issue.  However, 
kpm (process manager) is replaced by a less informative K 
System Guard. I care about this one because system guard 
doesn't support all the break and kill signals that kpm 
does, it doesn't have the system health meters, and the 
updates come a little quicker than I can click-to-kill, so 
I've been playing hide n seek with runaway yahoo messengers  
(annoying AND affects system integrity.) The overall feel 
of the subtle changes is similar to the stuff that 
disappeared or got harder to do between windows 95 and 
windows 98, only mandrake can't pretend it has a monopoly 
to allow it to force feed the masses. 
 
The straw that broke the camel's back was the missing Kover 
program. I know its just a jewel case creator, and there 
are other programs with more features.  This one is just 
what I've been using for 10 or more loads to keep my 
bookshelves of disks semi-organized.  For getting text down 
the spine of a CD case, this program is the simplest. I've 
got several hundred CD's, mostly variants of linux, but 
also a huge classical music collection, and about 50% of 
the games made for Dreamcast.  Keeping these organized IS a 
big deal for me, and I'm falling behind because I haven't 
found a replacement for kover. Most of the programs lately 
have automated searches of CD title databases, but stuff in 
those databases doesn't apply to 99% of what I stick in 
jewel cases. All of the kover replacements i've tried 
require mousing around and multiple clicks. With kover, you 
can complete each label with the keyboard only (tabbing 
works.)  

I know I could go hunt down a binary that won't crash on 
mandrake 9,  or get the source and compile my own.  If a 
short search doesn't find a good replacement, I probably 
will.  The purpose of a distribution is to prevent you 
having to deal with so many minor details, and this time 
Mandrake left a lot of details for me to deal with.