The next linux to test was Mandriva. I recall to use Mandrake some years ago. First point regarding Mandriva, is that I downloaded the DVD version. That means I was installing with more than 4GB of software on my DVD drive. Why that is relevant? Keep reading.
The installation was easy. The interface is quite good, although not as detailed as OpenSuse installation, but better than Fedora interface. Regarding this installation, my main complain is to have Portugal listed in the secondary countries list, while some strange countries appear in the main countries list. Also, that wouldn’t be bad if it was more intuitive to select.
Regarding the installation, I miss the detailed information about what is going on. Mandriva keeps showing screenshots of their linux desktops. Also, that is a stupid thing to do, as in a small screenshot you can not detect any difference on the image for the different Mandriva distributions. Probably a list of features would be better. Lack of reflection for the Mandriva product managers.
It all went correctly until the wireless configuration. The laptop has a Intel 3945 802.11g Wireless card. It is not that recent, and there are open source drivers available. In fact, it seems that most recent kernels include this driver. But Mandriva does not include it in the 4GB of software. Oh, and I was using the 2010.0 distribution.
Probably to include more drivers and less crap would help users. I do not care if I need to use the internet connection to download gnome or kde widgets. But I really care if I need to use the internet connection to download the wireless driver, that does not let me to connect to the internet to download… yeah… kind of remembers me of BOFH story of sending by email the password to read the email.
Now I am wondering. If I need to install drivers by hand, probably the best is to go back to my predilection linux distributions, like Slackware or Arch Linux. At least these assume they are not for common desktop users. Well, the other option is to test ubuntu or debian.
Ainda bem que alguém se deu ao trabalho de instalar um DVD que só por si só já era de esperar um fail qualquer, felizmente não fui eu, senão estaria bem irritado.
Visto que não tens problemas de ser KDE ou GNOME (pelo que me pareceu…) talvez além de Ubuntu e Debian, também tens soluções BSD (PC-BSD por exemplo).
Na minha opinião, continuo a usar Ubuntu à cerca de 2 anos e só tenho bem a dizer, se quero algo eu sei que pelo menos no Ubuntu terei a resposta às minhas necessidades.
E já agora essa do wireless também já me aconteceu no ubuntu, e não sei explicar porquê, pois a máquina era a mesma, e o cd era o mesmo, e por razões desconhecidas não me instalou os drivers.
Mas foi uma vez sem exemplo, tanto que até já estou a usar ubuntu como servidor.