I am in the middle of a benefit so I have not participated in the development process this time. But my brother (a very loud microsoft proponent) has tried it out. He actually was very impressed but ran into two problems that I heard about, one dealing with the nvidea driver and the other was the mouse lockup problem. I don't have enough info to help debug it, but it appears that I have seen similar issues reported. For what it is worth, he runs a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. For people like him, if this was the release, he would install it, run into a problem with a basic issue, and lose interest (this has been the history as he has installed every new version of Mandrake). These are the people who will need to convert. He is open, but Mandrake has lost out because of the little things. When the little details are handled, we are there.
Ben Reser ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote*: > >On Sat, Sep 21, 2002 at 08:36:40PM +0000, SI Reasoning wrote: >> I've said this before... but I'll say it again... >> Rushing a release to meet a schedule, instead of releasing when fully stable, ends >> up hurting the distro in the long run. With Redhat, Sun, Lindows, Xandros and a host >> of others now focusing on the desktop (of which Mandrake has been the leader until >> now) means that extra scrutiny will be placed on this release. If things don't work >> out of the box, many people will wipe it and try Redhat, etc. The tolerance for >> outstanding bugs will be much lower for a while. Since Mandrake plans on this being >> the last of the 6 month release schedule, I think getting it just right before >> release becomes even more important. > >At some point in time you have to call it done. 9.0 seems to me to be >the most polished Mandrake release ever. Everyone else is playing catch >up. And they are all using the same software. So if Mandrake has an >issue with this guy's mouse everyone else is likely too. Without >instructions on how to replicate his issue or an error showing why the >kernel doesn't think that device is present on his system it will be >very difficult to fix. > >All bugs are fixable with limitless time and money. Most bugs are not >fixable with the time, money and information available. This is a >reality of software development for end users. Especially when doing >software development for a wide variety of hardware that you can't >possibly have access to all of it. > >This is especially true for bugs related to specific hardware (as his >seems to be since nobody else seems to be reporting the same bug). >Unlike the Windows world where the hardware manufacturers provide their >hardware to Microsoft to do verification that it works right. The Linux >world doesn't have that. Instead users have to put a degree of effort >into figuring out why their hardware isn't working. > >And this is certainly not a different situation for any of the other >Linux distributors. > > >Never take no as an answer from someone who isn't authorized to say yes. > -- SI Reasoning [EMAIL PROTECTED] gpg public key ftp://ftp.p-p-i.com/pub/si-mindspring-pubkey.asc The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Albert Einstein
