yea!!
Mandriva is the new kid on the block. Real classic Linux users will remember Mandrake.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Mandrake was the 2nd distro I tried some 25 years ago.
I first tried a version of red hat that I got from a CD on the cover of a PC magazine back in 1999. I was barely a teenager, didn't know what I was doing, ended up hating it. Then a couple years later I read about Mandrake, again got it from a CD on the front of a magazine. I used it for about a year before hopping to Slackware.
My love hate relationship started with that cd. My dad hated it though because I was screwing up the boot every time.
My first around the same time, I couldn't believe something like that was free. Now I'm on Bazzite and I still can't believe it.
Same here. I started out on Debian Woody, then decided to try a side install of Mandrake specifically because it was supposed to be the most user-friendly option. I do recall liking the Mandrake experience well enough at the time--but stayed primarily using Debian, because I'm stubborn and rather enjoyed the sense of challenge.
(Also kinda setting the continuing pattern of keeping at least one side distro or OS going to try out. These days, they are more likely to live in VMs though.)
I'm not a classic Linuxer (I switched in 2015) but I did once try Mandrake out of historical curiosity. From what I hear it was the recommended "beginner-friendly" distro before Ubuntu came out. And based on how hard it was to get working on a VM, I now understand why classic Linuxers talk about Ubuntu like it was this huge sea change.
It ran fairly well for me out of the box. I think it's similar to trying to run Windows 98/2000/XP on modern VM software, it gets utterly confused and needs very specific hardware configuration to boot. Modern VMs run this good in big part because of paravirtualized hardware.
I think what made Ubuntu so good is a combination of being based on Debian and also being there at the right time when Linux software was getting generally better. When I tried Mandrake it was too early for Wine to run any sort of game, codecs were lacking for video. When I tried Linux again with Ubuntu, there was now VirtualBox and computers fast enough to run that reasonably, graphics drivers were more usable. Compiz was popping off to show off that Xorg could now do compositing like macOS and Vista.
Mandrake was good but limited by what Linux could do back then. Enjoyed it quite a bit but 9 year old me ran back to XP for the games. When I tried Ubuntu I was a bit older and more interested in programming and WoW ran great in Wine, so I managed to stick and have been on Linux since.
Linux was a lot more fun in the old days, but it's a lot more useable now.
My very first distro I believe was Mandrake 10, it's the distro that planted the seed to eventually switch for real with Ubuntu 7.10
... And conectiva.
And they may know how conectiva died, and have sworn off SuSE because of it.
Damn, I didn’t realise I still had that memory until now!
Huh, my first Linux distro was the very same distro and version that the original release of Linux-Mandrake was based on (Red Hat Linux 5.1)
I recall trying Mandrake at some point, but I don't remember when. I might have had it installed on a laptop.
Aah, tho med brain didn't lie to me, good to know!
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Mandrake was my first Linux OS.
Mine too! But for a couple days only.
Basically the Pimp Named Slickback of Linux distributions.
woah blast from the past
Another contender:
context please, I am an uneducated delinquent
Yellow Dog Linux was the/an option for those with PowerPC processors in their Macs and clones from the olden days.
I'm pretty sure I ran this on a PS3.
Fedora for PPC (I kid)
Bah. Make it a challenge.
Turbo. Conectiva. Stampede. Corel. Open.
And the painfully ironically-named UnitedLinux. Go get the inside scoop on that gangwar.
Man, Corel Linux looks like a vibe. The box looks familiar but don't think I ever used it.
@dx1 @corsicanguppy Corel was the revolution we need on the Desktop distros. It was the first distro with a graphical installation (and an easy one). Corel just didn't have the luck they needed, because it was released with KDE 1 with the corresponding qt libraries. KDE 2 was released just a year or less after the Corel Linux be released.
Corel was beautiful. It was, like gWave, ahead of its time.
And, being from Corel, it wasn't only beautiful, but also tainted by PTSD from using CorelDRAW, which was so bad that the user needed to reboot after/while using it to reclaim leaked RAM.
Mandrake and Win4Lin, was an amazing time. Back when corporate had you running windows 98se, and you could run it in Mandrake Linux sooo much faster than native. Miss that.
Mandrake 10 was my first distro, then I was hooked.
Mandriva was for windows users. Hardly Linux users.
In February 2004, MandrakeSoft lost a court case against Hearst Corporation, owners of King Features Syndicate. Hearst contended that MandrakeSoft infringed upon King Features' trademarked character Mandrake the Magician. As a precaution, MandrakeSoft renamed its products by removing the space between the brand name and the product name and changing the first letter of the product name to lower case, thus creating one word. Starting from version 10.0, Mandrake Linux became known as mandrakelinux, and its logo changed accordingly. Similarly, MandrakeMove (a Live CD version) became Mandrakemove.
In April 2005, Mandrakesoft announced the corporate acquisition of Conectiva, a Brazilian-based company that produced a Linux distribution for Portuguese-speaking (Brazil) and Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result of this acquisition and the legal dispute with Hearst Corporation, Mandrakesoft announced that the company was changing its name to Mandriva, and that their Linux distribution Mandrake Linux would henceforward be known as Mandriva Linux.
Thanks so much for these old memories!
yea you're welcome, a classic linux for all people
Probably still have a Mandrake cover CD somewhere
@adrianhooves This unlocked a core memory in me ... And I hated it. Old kde (I think 3) couldn't run on my potato...and I wasn't versed enough then to change that.
Edit - landed on pclinuxos for a bit
Had a good but short run.
Damn I don't remember using it personally but i think my dad had an install cd with this logo on it.
Oh wow, that was legit my second Linux distro back in 2002 after failed attempts with SUSE.
But for some reason my brain remembered that it was called Mandrake, not Mandriva.
name change
Because it was. Only very late right before the project was killed they renamed it
I used Mandrake when the *.2 versions were the ones to install, starting with 8.2 and then they killed it all with the advertising :-(
Linux-Mandrake Russian Edition?
Aw, Mandrake! I didn't know what I was doing back then and chose it because of the root. Stuck with it until Ubuntu came out a bit later.
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