Linux vendor Mandriva has announced the availability of its Spring 2010 release, an updated version of its desktop Linux distribution. Mandriva originally planned to ship the software at the beginning of June, but had put the launch on hold due to serious financial difficulties that jeopardized the company's future. The Spring 2010 version was finally released last week after some new investors bailed out the company and made it possible for development efforts to continue.

Mandriva, which was previously known as Mandrake, is one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors. The French company was founded in 1998 with the aim of selling a heavily-customized derivative of Red Hat Linux that was designed for ease of use. It achieved considerable popularity among desktop Linux enthusiasts during the tail end of the '90s, because it had excellent hardware compatibility and was easier to install and configure than many other Linux distributions that were available at the time.

Despite its early successes, Mandriva's finances eventually crumbled. When the growing ubiquity of broadband made it easy for Linux users to download free distributions from the Internet, the market for boxed and shrink-wrapped commercial Linux products largely evaporated. As other mainstream distributions boosted their usability and hardware support, Mandriva lost much of its uniqueness. The company fell into bankruptcy in 2003 but recovered the following year and expanded by acquiring Conectiva and Lycoris.

Following the June announcement that the Spring 2010 release would be delayed, rumors emerged that the company was in danger of shutting down entirely and was desperately seeking a buyer. Two prospective buyers, Lightapp and Linagora, were said to be in talks with Mandriva. The sale never happened, however, because the company's CEO secured sufficient funding from unnamed investors.

Mandriva has numerous connections in the French software industry and is heavily involved in some key research projects that are important to its partners. One of those partners, a Parisian open source vendor called IF Research, helped Mandriva find investors and is now involved in Mandriva's ongoing cost-cutting and restructuring plan. They believe that the potential still exists for full recovery.

Mandriva 2010 Spring

The Mandriva Linux distribution is distributed in several forms. The standard version, called Mandriva One, is an installable Live CD made available by the company at no cost via BitTorrent. The full commercial variant, called the Mandriva Powerpack, is sold to consumers through a subscription model.

We tested the KDE edition of Mandriva Linux One 2010 Spring. We chose to test it with KDE because Mandriva is generally regarded as a KDE-centric distribution. We initially tested it in VirtualBox to get a feel for the general user experience and then installed it on a Dell laptop to evaluate its hardware support. The installation process was mostly painless and on par with what we expect from a modern Live CD installer. It ran flawlessly in the virtualized environment and even installed the VirtualBox guest tools automatically. We had no difficulty getting it to run on the laptop.

The OS ships with KDE 4.4.3 and version 2.6.33.5 of the Linux kernel. Mandriva has its own custom user interface theme that is used across both KDE and GNOME, and its default KDE configuration deviates from that of upstream KDE. It uses a Folder View containment as the default activity and it has a conventional application menu instead of KDE's Kickoff menu. These changes are intended to make KDE 4 feel more like the classic user experience of the KDE 3.5.x series.

The default installation includes a well-rounded KDE application stack, but it doesn't consistently favor KDE in cases where there are popular and more mainstream alternatives. For example, Mandriva ships with OpenOffice.org (OOo) instead of KOffice and has Firefox configured as the default browser rather than KDE's own Konqueror. The non-KDE applications are consistently themed to match the rest of the environment and have a pleasing level of desktop integration. For example, native KDE file dialogs are used in both Firefox and OOo.

One of Mandriva's key features is its control center, a hardware configuration tool that allows users to centrally manage the settings for graphics, sound, input devices, storage devices, and networking. It's a bit like openSUSE's YaST tool, but a bit simpler. I didn't need to touch it because all of my hardware was configured properly out of the box.

Mandriva's developers tout tight integration with KDE's semantic desktop framework, called Nepomuk, as one of the major features of the new version. I saw support for Nepomuk exposed through the user interface in several places in Dolphin and the file dialogs. For example, you can browse your files by date and add semantic annotations by right-clicking a file in the file manager. You can see an overview of some of the new semantic desktop features in the Mandriva Labs blog.

After spending some time with the latest version of Mandriva, I can see why it remains appealing to so many KDE users. It has a sense of simplicity, consistency, and conservatism that are unusual in the KDE world. Subjectively, it feels much better than Kubuntu but doesn't quite rival openSUSE's power and sophistication.

The new version is available for download from the Mandriva Web site. For additional details about the new features, you can refer to the official release announcement.