Mandrake or Fedora?

Wed Jan 14 23:57:48 UTC 2004

Hi Madison,

At 00:08 14/01/2004 -0500, Madison Kelly wrote:
>Humm, hard to put a finger on it... I guess I would say I felt like it was 
>designed to be easy to use but it wasn't easy enough (for a nooby target 
>audience) and it made configuring it by someone a little more experienced 
>more difficult than it should have been (by hiding the scarry stuff).

Funny you should say that. I would pick Mandrake as my number one choice to 
give to someone who has never touched Linux before, in fact, I did on the 
weekend. My mother, who is not very technically inclined at all, has joined 
the ranks of Linux users with Mandrake 9.2 on her machine and so far, so 
good. Mandrake pays considerable attention to usability issues, at least in 
KDE. I have no idea about how things are sorted out in Gnome since I do not 
use it. For example, users new to Linux are bewildered by the huge array of 
choices that one is presented with if they go the "Word Processors" menu. 
Who needs three or more word processors? Yes, I know choice is good but, 
for new users, it is distressing. Furthermore, though *we* may know that 
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet, new users probably will not. Mandrake deals with 
this problem by adding a "What to do?" menu to the standard KDE menus. That 
menu is task oriented. On it are choices like "Use the Internet", "View, 
modify, or create graphics". Selecting one of those, say "Use the 
Internet", presents more task oriented choices like "Chat using an AOL 
instant messenger client", "Read and send mail". Users think in terms of 
the tasks they want to perform, not in terms of the applications they need 
to use to do things.

As for experienced users, I am not sure what gave you the idea that things 
were hidden since one can find a terminal in KDE, my desktop manager of 
choice, in Mandrake faster than in Red Hat. There is no special magic in 
Mandrake that "hides" things. All the gory details are there if you care to 
see them. Mandrake is perfectly happy running headless without KDE or X. 
ssh, urpmi, chkconfig, and all the other command line tools that one needs 
to admin a box all work from the command line perfectly well and in fact, 
with or without a GUI installed, that is how I typically do system 
administration anyway.

I think a good user interface should be layered. It should make difficult 
things easy for everyone while still allowing experienced users to not be 
limited to working the same way that new users may want to work. It should 
abstract out the fiddly details to help users who just want to get things 
done without having to read man pages, assuming they even know such things 
exist, without too much fuss or bother. It should also allow experienced 
users or users who may find the command line or other ways of doing things 
the freedom to do that without fear of breaking something. In other words, 
the GUI tools should not clobber changes made by command line tools or vice 
versa. I think Mandrake does this very well, as well or better than any 
other Linux distro I have used. The one major distro I have not tried 
lately is SuSE which also has a reputation for being quite good in this 
respect.

A distribution that fails in this layered approach I described above is 
e-smith/SME Server. While it is possible to modify config files from the 
command line, there are dire warnings at the top of every file that your 
changes will be clobbered the next time that file is regenerated. In an 
attempt to make the distro easy enough to be used by the receptionist, they 
created a clever way of generating the config files using templates. It 
succeeds in making the distro easy to admin using nothing more than a 
browser. It is possible to customize things using the command line but you 
had better understand the architecture of e-smith before doing that. For 
example, the usual useradd command creates a home directory under /home. 
E-smith has a script that generates a user's home directory under 
/home/e-smith/files/users/ so using useradd, which is there but should not 
be used, subverts the e-smith way of doing things. There are good reasons 
for it to do that and I will not get into them right now but my point is, 
Red Hat and Mandrake are nothing like that at all. They are much more 
agnostic about the way things are done to the point where it does not 
really matter if you use their GUI tools or not. I think this issue of 
things being "hidden" is a non issue because it simply is not the case.

>I guess I would sum by saying it felt like a jack of all trades and master 
>of none.

I suppose this can be interpreted to be a positive, though I do not agree 
with your assessment. I think Mandrake wins on subtle differences, some of 
which are not apparent immediately after installation. When distros get as 
good as the three major distros, Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE, the 
differentiators are in the details, not on major architectural issues. 
These large distros have to be jack of all trades types of distros to 
remain competitive since they have to appeal to as broad an audience as 
possible. If you want specialized distros, there are no shortage of them.

>On the other hand I find Fedora is a better balance. Still easy to use 
>(with a little hand-holding for the nooby) while also being easy to get at 
>it's guts when needed.

Never having touched Fedora, I am left wondering how different from Red Hat 
it is. I suspect it is the "geek factor" that may be driving some people to 
Fedora. By that I mean, there is a certain amount of bragging rights that 
comes with being on the edge, having compiled a kernel, manually installed 
modules, etc., not that I am suggesting one has to do any of these things 
with Fedora but that distros that attempt to simplify or eliminate the need 
to do these things are looked down upon by some segment of the population. 
Those bragging rights only mean something to other similarly inclined 
individuals. Then there is the rest of the world where they do not (and 
should not) give a whit about this sort of thing. All we have to do is look 
at the dismissive comments some people make about OS X to see that 
mentality at work.

This reminds me of the headline I saw once said that said "Flash! Number of 
Linux Distributions Surpasses Number of Linux Users!" Though it was meant 
to be satirical, I think there is some element of truth to it. The beauty 
(and curse) of Linux is that it can be customized almost infinitely to suit 
one's preferences to the point of even creating one's own distro.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4N 3P6

Tel: 416-410-3326  

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