Re: Hot complaints about YDL 2.1


Subject: Re: Hot complaints about YDL 2.1
From: andu (undo@cloud9.net)
Date: Sun Oct 28 2001 - 19:46:23 MST


Dan Burcaw wrote:

> MandrakeSoft has been given millions! of dollars of VC money and has a staff
> full of folks that update software and write applications to make things
> easier. It's pretty remarkable what we do with very little money, and just a
> handle of people.. and mostly just me for the technical stuff.
>
> This is our niche, and things work damn well. The Apple DVD-ROM problem is
> unfortunate.. but the 2.4 kernel should work well for most people from install
> to post-install flawlessly. There are certain cases where this won't be the
> case such as some older hardware and folks with certain DVD-ROMs from Apple.
>
> I stand by my product.

And so you should, trouble is that others must stand by your product as
well in order for you to make a bread and that's the challenging part.

Apple doesn't make it easy for you changing specs every 6 months and
neither do users who basically expect some sort of windows-like thing on
their expansive Macs with all the bells and whistles they can think of.

I personally believe the current strategy for YDL isn't quite helping;
given the above this is not a one man job no matter how smart you are.
 Also given the not so large user base, some restrictions regarding the
latest and shiniest should have been in place long ago: you can claim
KDE or Gnome only this much as being third party products therefore not
exactly your problem, but then you have no obligation to compromise your
distribution with alpha/beta quality software either.
Stuff like GUI installer and shit like that should be last on the list,
if people can't read and they only want pictures then they don't need
linux, you can't make everyone happy nor should you want to.
 Stability should be your obsession--a distribution which has less bells
and whistles then say, Mandrake (which I strongly dislike) but which,
whatever it does, it does it right, from installation to desktop to
server.
The problem of dual/single/triple boot should've been solved by now 100%
and documented 100%.
I see on the list certain issues recurring over and over regarding
installation, I mean people can't pass that one initial step. I doubt
they are *all* stupid so there must be something for you in there.

I for one wish you guys based YDL on say, Slackware that is, focus less
on a YDL-ized distribution and make sure that an existing one (and a
really good one in this case) installs and runs just as well on PPC as
it does on PCs since this seems to be the major cry of the masses. The
rest can come in time as it matures.
Nevertheless, keep up the good work.

>
> -Dan

Andu



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