Mandriva going Debian?

Posted by Eric Stewart Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:37:00 GMT

I didn’t really expect to hear this any time.. well.. ever! One technology strategist at least seems to think Mandriva will move from being Red Hat based to Debian based.

At the beginning of this year I might have been ambivalent about such a move. But in March, after being a Mandrake (now Mandriva) user for several years I made the switch to Ubuntu. More specifically, I moved to Kubuntu, being more of a KDE fan as of late. I haven’t looked back.

Despite making a concurrent switch to amd64 builds (and the associated extra headaches with being a relatively early adopter) the switch has been a great success. Why has it been better?

package management and installation has been easier (Synaptic and apt-get are nice!)
I have had no real dependency headaches – apt-get has kept me out of trouble pretty well
wider availability of stable software
I like system structure better – things like apache layout/config better thought through
seems to have a great, responsive community
Ubuntu highly leverages their Debian base

Some things have not gone so smoothly. Much having to do with using the amd64 version of the distribution:

Fewer binaries available/harder to track down some dependencies
Drivers not always available
Some things (like hotplugging) didn’t work as well out of the box as the non-amd64 dist
Software overally not kept quite as up-to-date, though this is not purely a bad thing

Audo/Video have been problematic and inconsistent

Overall I’m very happy and haven’t thought of going back. I can’t say how much of this is due to the Debian base, but my current impression is that it would be a good move. RPM gave me nothing but headaches.