How do the 'offspring' of Mandrake/Mandriva compare to one another? IIRC, there's ALT, Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and ROSA.
I've also come to the understanding that what set Mandrake apart from its peers was its polish and user-friendliness. Which, harbored a great community back in the days. Currently, however, this role is fulfilled by distros like Linux Mint. Furthermore, most distros are relatively straightforward anyways. So, my other questions would be:
- Could the argument be made that Linux Mint is the actual spiritual successor to Mandrake?
- Are the Mandrake-offspring's most compelling raison d'être that they're Mandrake's offspring?
I think Ubuntu was and probably continues to be the real “spiritual successor” just because it is still widely used and is still very polished and user friendly as long as you want to keep with their experience. However, to really compare the “ease of use” (hand holding?) vs contemporaries of Mandrake, Elementary or Zorin might fit the role. They are simplified compared to even Ubuntu, Mint, or Pop OS.
All of the distros have gotten so much easier than they were at the time though. When X got autoconfiguration rather than a distro installer trying to guess and generate a config it was a huge game changer from the way it was before (the days when Debian warned about destroying your monitor). In some ways I think this was one of the largest ease of use changes we’ve had. The other stuff just got better.
I think they are mostly compelling to people who like the nostalgia and were fans of Mandrake. Mandrake was hugely popular in its time. I somewhat doubt they are getting a ton of new converts, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I wonder what would happen if this amount of effort and persistence was put into something more useful.
We’d all be running BSD or Hurd, and not some hobby project a college kid made just for fun.