mandrake rant

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Timothy recounted his woes configuring Mandrake, and wondered if he would be
rewarding sub-standard development or encourage them to do better if he
"joined" the "mandrake club".

Myself, I started this because I was wondering about supporting them, and I
would if they felt contrubutions of significantly smallaer amounts were
worthwhile.  They don't, so I don't - at least as far as cash support goes.
I do try to learn and understand how to use Mandrake as a tool, so I can get
others involved and spread the knowledge of Mandrake as a good solution; and
I also try to provide feedback regarding the shortcomings that bother me
most.

Unfortunately, a lot of developers don't want to hear from non-programmsers
that their interface sucks and could only be useful as a starting point for
an experienced coder to build their own.  They think that we should be
grateful for whatever crap they throw us, and if we don't like it we can
learn to code.

I worked for many years with the developers of software that was distributed
as shareware over the FIDOnet system, and I can testify that collaberation
between coders and educated non-coding users is an excellent way to develop
software that will ultimately end up in the hands of general, non-coding
users.  For some reason, commercial software seems to develop with
non-educated end users providing the feedback, which results in strange
feature creep and weird solutions that don't fit well together.

Anyway, I encourage peoople who want to support Mandrake to do so by
providing such feedback.  If you get rebuffed by arrogant developers, simply
mark that program off of your support list and go on to something else where
it's appreciated.

As far as your configuration issues go, Tim, I think one of your problem is
that you're using conflicting and incomplete high-level configuration
programs that aim to emulate Microsofts "Wizards" - with all the problems
that that implies.  Rip out the utilities and go straight for the text-based
files that originally controll these programs.  You may need to leaf through
many HOWTOs and man pages, but in the end you'll have finer control over a
more stable system.