Mandriva – The Next Generation

Mandriva 2007 Spring was already a very nice distribution with a lots of improvements and changes in style from the previous versions. severely improved graphical themes, the public availability of non-free packages, getting update notifications on the desktop without Mandriva subscription, and a generally more polished system.

For the next version of Mandriva, the bar is again set a lot higher than before. Last week, two interesting announcements were made:

  • David Barth announced that some internal re-organization was done at Mandriva, and that the community will be more actively involved in the development of the next Mandriva version. What this means in practice, and how this will work out, remains to be seen, but I have the feeling that this is a confirmation of something we have seen already in 2007.1: Mandriva really cares about the community now, and makes use of the community’s remarks to improve the distribution.
  • Anne Nicolas, who will follow-up development of next Mandriva’s versions from now on, announced that an effort will be done to get Mandriva’s bugzilla cleaned up and to improve the workflow of bug reports, which should result in a more bug free distribution. All new bug reports will first be checked by a team, which will verify the validity of the report, and which will collect all necessary information for the developers to be able to analyze and fix the bug. If developers receive more high quality reports, this will hopefully result in quicker and more bug fixing. Statistics about the bug fixing progress will be collected, in order to pinpoint problematic parts of the distribution, so this can be acted upon.

This is all great news. Mandriva shows that it is not wanting to be yet another ordinary nice Linux distribution, but that it has the ambition to be a real leader. Interesting times are coming!