Mandrake and HP Alliance
Yesterday, Mandrake and HP announced an alliance to ship low-cost PCs pre-installed with Mandrake Linux 9.1. This is great news. Mandrake is a fabulous distribution — it really is (and it happens to be what I run at home).
Seeing more and more Linux distributions marketted toward the average end-user, at a realtively low-price too, makes me quite happy. I’m glad to see new competition for Microsoft. But, I have to wonder — of these distributions (Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake and RedHat probably being the most popular pre-installed) which ones really are the easiest for the non-techy end-user to get along with?
My bet would be Lindows. They offer a service called Click-N-Run which enables Lindows users to easily download and install new software. It’s probably similar to the rpm-system that Mandrake and RedHat (and SuSE and …) use, but a little more stream-lined. After I install new software via an rpm-file on Mandrake, I have to manually figure out where the application was installed (ie., what path), and what the application executable file is called. Usually it’s pretty easy to guess from the package name. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, no changes are ever made to the menu system (be it KDE’s or Gnome’s). Not such a big deal for me, but for new users really annoying. Putting all of this in writing makes me wonder whether I’m out of my mind — because, really — why on earth wouldn’t you add it to the menu?
Back to Lindows. The problem is that there is an annual subscription fee to use Click-n-Run. While it’s still cheaper than Windows, especially since most software for Linux is free, I wonder whether end-users will appreciate that the same way more open-source-friendly people would.
Earlier this year Mandrake was in some financial trouble and filed for bankruptcy protection. Hopefully this deal will help them recover. I don’t want to lose my Mandrake distribution!
