Moderator note: This thread was created from a discussion that started here.
Yeah no problem, I realize that, and everything has a learning curve, I work as tech support in my job and everything I know about Windows was from years of using and fixing it, with Linux is almost the same and that is why I also remember some stuff and tried to come back again, the thing usually is the sources you have to fix problems or understand them without previously knowing.
Linux anyway forces you to learn a lot, it is nice and useful but sometimes we donāt have that time to learn and want to simply utilize the OS we have, same as games fighting to make them work on a PC or simply put them in the console and play them.
I will calmly reinstall Mandriva this weekend and tune it way faster than before. It took me some time since I was not used to KDE anymore, Mint felt easier since I already had it in my motherās PC (I gave her Mint since like you said the learning curve is there always and she never used a PC before so it was gonna be the same Linux or Windows for her)
Thanks a lot for the help, I hope nothing else happens for now, I want a time to simply enjoy using the OS and not fixing it lol.
PD: Now that you mention it, yes there are things specifict Mandriva and it is not a highly chose distribution so most stuff out there doesnāt apply here or searching for Mandriva specifically leads to almost no results sometimes
Ah, so weāll probably find times when you are teaching me things. Actually I learn a lot trying to help people here.
And no OpenMandriva is not the most popular Linux distro. It is well worth users to keep in mind that everything is done by about a dozen all volunteer/part time people about half of whom qualify as developers. Where some larger Linux distros might be in 60-100+ range for developers alone with total contributors maybe double that. I think Mandriva might have been 30-50 devs and 60-100 contribs or there about. Mandriva SA the company had employees as do the organizations linked with Unbuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. That makes a huge difference also.
Another perspective on what OpenMandriva can do might be financial. Iām not positive about this but I think the expenditures per year for OMA range from about $15,000 at the highest to maybe $3000 in some years. (13,500 EUR to 2700 EUR). In other words the whole shebang gets less money than one employee would be paid. So in real world terms what OM the distro and OMA have done is absolutely freaking remarkable. Imperfections though there are.
And the best is yet to come especially from user perspective. The majority of the work, especially by developers, has been on basic system stuff, getting rid of bad or ancient, outdated code and scripts. Basically things that from user perspective are āunder the hoodā so to speak and users arenāt normally aware of though it does affect them profoundly. This work is still in progress. Over time as this phase of developing the distro gets more complete then developers will have more time for other things like perhaps creating new GUI application for some system maintenance stuff. Maybe more work possible on cosmetic things and desktop functions, ect. So users should see incremental improvement, including more ācompletenessā in OM Lx 4.1, 4.2. And we hope to have a more polished distro overall by OM Lx 5.0 or 5.2. Small group. We do what we can do today and add to it tomorrow. Edit: And the belief is that a year from today that adds up to a lot of improvement.
Yeah that is why I also want to learn the system, maybe I will be able to help someone sometime, but again I am not a programmer or developer and I donāt have really much time to spend with that honestly.
I will try to donate at least ā¬2 each month, it is low but if a lot of people think the same it will sum up.
I think one of the things I like and almost cry about thinking is how hard a bunch of people keep working in something they can simply let die and move on over other stuff and try their best to make it work, I am fond to Mandriva because it was the first distro I used and specially helped me a lot to learn Linux. I know it doesnāt seem I know a lot by now lol, I forgot many things but if you pay atention many things you people told me to try for fixing my problems I did it and even thought about them.
I didnāt notice people being elitist AF like before, I kind of hate that part of Linux comunity in some places where they are all high and mighty āIf you donāt know that you donāt deserve to use Linuxā and calling āmonkeysā to any standard user, I remember that pretty well, and that was part of Mandriva comunity 10 years ago but there were also good people like you now and others who didnāt have that vision of the rest.
It is sad tho, since they whine first because Linux is not being used by many people but act elitist as a closed group, even saying things like there is no need for GUI in many stuff. That is why Mint is IMO one of the best distros with no meaning to offend you people, but they did an incredible job and even worked their own DE, it feels like a system made for spreading Linux to the standard user and it is nice to watch. I hope Mandriva some day will be that great, at least I will keep using it and supporting it (unless something terrible in the PC happens lol)
That was kind of off topic but I wanted to write what I think openly and thank you all people who keep Mandriva alive and help newcommers like me. Cheers and hugs.
Just to be clear Iām a user not a developer. I donāt necessarily know more than anyone else that posts here so knowledge and learning is a 2 way street for me on this forum. There are people here that do know more than me. That is a fact I wonāt hesitate to point out. And I do refer to myself as a Linux monkey because on the contributor team I sort of mostly do monkey work. So if you or anyone sees me using the monkey emojiās they refer to me not you or anyone else here.
Since I will be reinstalling this night I have an important question about it (I already covered many things to do better this time upon installing tho) which isā¦ is there a Software Installer Manager with a better GUI? Like Discover for instance or something similar as the Synaptic in Mint showing the Apps by group AND screenshot of them? I think that is the main issue I had this time searching for alternatives to programs I used to install.
I read Discover wasnāt properly working but didnāt find alternatives, I searched for programs and had no idea how they were with the standard installation center unless I go to google and try to search for it (annoying).
I hope there is, or some external site I can do something similar and then search and install them by konsole later, but I need some graphical app store to look for programs this time.
First everyone should read this before installing OpenMandriva Lx. Read it and ask questions until you understand it before you install OM Lx.
We recommend users do package management from command line. When we see users get themselves in trouble it is most often people that use GUI package managers. And using GUI package managers makes things much more difficult to trace to a cause when there are problems. IMO GUI package managers waste a lot of time. I see the over, and over, and over. (Yes I use them occasionally and I test them.)
Plus the big secret is that managing packages from command line is not that difficult. A 12 year old can learn all most users need to know in 10 min. From that point you just need to know where the documentation is for times when you have a question or need something you donāt do on a weekly basis. My personal opinion is that I like knowing what Iām doing and seeing what the system is doing while Iām doing it. Feels much, much, more secure to me.
Yes Discover is not working correctly in OM Lx according to our developers. Do not use Discover, some of us are pushing to either get if fixed or remove it. We see Discover as a continual source of problems. And I wish I had a different answer for this but I have to report what developers tell us.
dnfdragora is the only GUI package manager available. We make it available as a choice for users but again we recommend that all of you take the short amount of time required to learn package management from command line. At least learn dnf and use both command line and dnfdragora so you know what you are doing.
Yes. It is called the Internet. You can learn more about available packages for a given task with internet search than you will ever learn with Synaptic, Discover, or dnfdragora. And it aināt like it is āso hardā or you donāt already know how to do it. Then to find out if OM Lx has the package in your enabled repos use the command ādnf searchā.
Post-edit: Also we encourage users to report missing software here. We really need more help with this than we are getting. @AngryPenguin and other devs do a great job of responding to these requests.
Will OpenMandriva ever write itās own GUI or get in to customizing dnfdragora specifically for OpenMandriva users. Perhaps but I doubt it will happen before OM Lx 5 or 6.
My personal opinion is that at this time users that are resistant to using command line are going to have difficult moments using OM Lx 4. Will this improve with OM Lx 5 then more so with OM Lx 6. That is the goal.
Some things are simply easier and faster to do from command line. Some things are simpler and easier to do with GUI. Smart users, even everyday just want there computer to work users, use both.
Also let me digress to an earlier point in this thread. We keep getting confronted with users requesting things we donāt have resources to do or that will get done over the course of a year or 2 years of developer work. Remember the comparison of a Linux distro (us) with about 6 volunteer/part time developers to a Linux distro with multiple 10ās of devs and even a few employeeās. Yāall have no idea what a difference one or two full time employeeās would make. But OMA operates on a budget that would not pay a monkey (like me) to answer the phone. So we have do what we can with what we actually have and the biggest equalizer we have available is time. Post-edit: And every contributor and user gets frustrated by this at times. I know I do.
Yes I read it all before (but after installing the first time). I undestand what you say about command line and I have no problem using it IF I know what I am going to install, but there are 2 important points I think devs overlook at it usually (not in Mint, that is why Mint isā¦ Mint)
1 - If you are looking/searching for something, commnad line wonāt help you find a program unless you already know it exists and which one it is to install it
2 - For a standard user it is simple as showing them a GUI for Package Manager and tell them āLook there what you want to use and install itā
And those 2 points are super important IMO, that is the reason I gave my mother a PC with Mint and showed her to simply open the Synaptic panel to search for software and simply install it and use it. Also if someone is at my place and want to try Mandriva I can show them how to search for aplications and install them, while if they look at me with Konsole throwing commands they will instantly lose any appeal to even try that (That already happened to me in the past)
I want to test for myself if a OS can be used that way because then I can afirm āLinux have a GUI and you can install and use aplications even easier than you know and donāt need the Command Lineā
Now, if the philosofy of Mandriva is āUse the command lineā wellā¦ I will use, no problem about it but the reach to others you can get is obviously distant from many other distros.
Edit: Yeah, I remember what you said about human and financial resources, still I wanted to point that I get it is hard to do but shouldnāt be overlooked as ānot neccesaryā. Thanks again and cheers
First let me Iām just discussing with you and thinking out loud as I go. Not arguing, weāre agreeing more than otherwise. Also just describing from my perspective where OM is today and where we are going.
Yes, I agree developers do not tend to grasp this from user perspective. Also the issue isnāt āwe wonātā it is āyou donāt understand how much developers are working on things you donāt seeā and that work, of necessity has to come first. Then developers will have time to work on things like a GUI package manager that fits OM Lx and itās users.And other things, the list is long. Every OM contributor has a very long To Do list. Iām just saying that there are people, including developers, aware of this but for us to get to this there are, believe it or not, some much more important things that have to be done first.
There have been some massive changes in the world of Unix/Linux since 2010 and a lot of Linux distros are way behind the curve. OpenMandriva is actually being a leader in terms of a small group that is actively, aggressively, dealing with this. Unfortunately dealing with this, which is dealing with things most users donāt see, leaves us with little resources to deal with things users do see. At this time. Two examples, java and python, java took months of work to get āmostly fixed and up to dateā such that now OM users have by default java 12 where a lot of Linux distros are still using java 1.8. Python also has taken months of work to get closer to a sane state but there is still more work to do with python. Do users see either of these? Do users know how many man hours, for us literally months these have taken. Long term this will matter and matter a lot. It will also matter to distros that have not done this work yet. This is still the primary focus of OM devs and this is really what OM Lx 4.0 represents. Lx 4.0 is the result of massive amounts of thankless work cleaning things up, updating package stacks like java and python (there are more), cleaning up redundant fixes, patches, bad or outdated code, bad scripts, and more from the past. We will get to a point where this type of work is less time consuming and more of a maintenance thing. Then users will see more done on things that users do see. As Iāve said, somewhat in OM Lx 5 but more so OM Lx 6. So a year or more.
Note: Both java and python are notorious among all developers not just OM developers for making things difficult and incredibly time consuming for Linux distros to adapt what they do upstream. There are others, those are just 2 examples. Best not bring up any others to avoid flame wars.
Post-edit: For users we need to realize that because for things java devs have done upstream there are a lot of things we need to do to use java 12 are different from what we are used to with java 1.8. Because of how java devs did things a lot of Linux distros just stopped upgrading java so we all missed the changes over time with Java 8, 9, 10, 11 and now 12. I canāt tell users what to do because I donāt know, weāll all just have to ask developers.
Speaking of internet search if one does internet search for best Linux distro for beginners some distros you will see include (not necessarily in order):
Linux Mint (Been years since Iāve used)
Ubuntu (Iād rather drink weed killer than use Ubuntu, just my opinion)
Zorin (Never used)
Elementary (Never used)
Manjaro (Have used within last year and it seems just fine)
I never see a list with OpenMandriva in it. Go back to Mandriva days and Mandriva would have been in every list at the top in some lists. Draw your own conclusions.
For beginners that are not comfortable with OpenMandriva I would say first that I understand. I can recommend Manjaro from personal experience and by reputation also Linux Mint. I normally refrain from discussing Ubuntu due to personal prejudice. I donāt like it and yes, this is partly due to things they do that would not matter to most users. Also in the past when I used Ubuntu I did not find it to be trouble free. Best stop there. Post-edit: (And Iām well aware that OM is not trouble free either.)
Obviously I canāt recommend things I have never used.
For beginners that do want to continue to use OpenMandriva I definitely want to encourage that and am willing to help to the best of my ability. Same applies for experienced users that are new to OpenMandriva. I just donāt know how to do that without asking the user to do at least some reading and learning. And occasionally user may need to use the command line.
Edit: And these comments Iāve made in the thread are more general in nature and not directed at @Shinusagi or any other individual. Just me thinking out loud or rantingā¦
as it is derivated from Archlinux , intermediate level is always required , i do always update with command , and pacman and all mhwd are very powerful.
situation for Team manjaro is also little , but use mainly archlinux dev from Stable
why openmandriva cant use Git Rose Stable as initial version ?
(like me) to answer the phone. So we have do what we can with what we actually have and the biggest equalizer we have available is time. Post-edit: And every contributor and user gets frustrated by this at times. I know I do.
