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MandrakeSoft Interview
Interviewed by Waldo Bastian - December, 9th 2003
On December 1st this year MandrakeSoft announced a new product MandrakeMove based on the KDE Desktop. KDE::Enterprise caught up with Gaël Duval to ask a few questions about MandrakeMove and KDE.
We heard about your new product MandrakeMove, can you tell more about it?
MandrakeMove is a new MandrakeSoft product that benefits from a Mandrake Linux LiveCD which doesn't need to be installed to run on a computer, and a USB key that automatically records hardware configuration & personal data.
This is a great product to carry a Linux system everywhere, and to let others discover Linux. It provides everything for multimedia and office, and the price is very interesting.
What role does KDE play in MandrakeMove?
We couldn't put two different graphical interfaces in MandrakeMove because the CD media can't offer more than 700MB of compressed data. So KDE was chosen to be the default graphical interface in MandrakeMove. But a number of GNOME applications remain available in the product anyway.
What were your reasons for choosing KDE over other available desktops?
MandrakeSoft generally does its best to offer both KDE and GNOME to avoid fratricide wars, and because we do not want to choose in the place of our users what they want to use. Additionally, competition is excellent. Anyway, it seems that KDE tends to be currently used more widely than GNOME (at least by Mandrake users). This helped for the choice.
What do you like most about KDE?
I can only give my personal opinion, please understand that others at MandrakeSoft may have different point of view. I think that KDE has improved much recently, and it now offers a fast desktop environment with a great look & feel.
What do you like least about KDE?
Personal answer again: the relative lack of interoperability with other graphical environments. But this is not specific to KDE :-) Well, I also regret that KOffice cannot deal with MS-Office documents as well as OpenOffice.org does.
Could you tell us somewhat more about the work that Mandrake has done to integrate KDE in their products? Has this been a difficult process?
I'm certainly not the best people at MandrakeSoft to answer such a question, but the integration is done at different level, from packaging to default config and user interface. For instance, we have redesigned a complete look & feel theme for Mandrake, and this look & feel is common to KDE & GNOME.
But at MandrakeSoft we try not to modify KDE too much anyway.
How does Mandrake support the KDE community?
Mandrake has supported KDE for instance by supporting David Faure, Mosfet and others for a while, or by participating to the KDE League. This support has been reduced for financial reasons, but this probably is a temporary state.
Where would you like to see the future of KDE go, and what new features would you like to see in future releases?
I'm very impressed by KDE and it seems that users do as well, so it's a very difficult question! Speaking for myself (again), I would love to have a screensaver that displays images or webpages randomly found on the web. 'kwebdesktop', which has been a feature that I suggested to David a while ago, could even be an excellent candidate to build such a screensaver easily. But maybe it already exists somewhere!
More seriously, I think the environment itself is very mature, but we still lack office-oriented applications or features in applications. Additionally, "collaborative features" are still missing too often. Of course this will improve progressively and new projects such as Kolab are very promising. But if KDE could be perceived as a very easy environment that everybody could use to build new applications under Linux, this would certainly speed up things.
How do users that switch from Microsoft Windows to Mandrake Linux perceive that switch?
This depends on users. Issues often come from difficulties to handle such or such device under Linux, and from the relative lack of desktop-applications (compared to the Windows world). But at least, users don't have to recompile their kernel under Mandrake. :)
Actually, switchers may sometimes experience a short period where they feel a bit lost, but very quickly they are amazed by what they discover into Mandrake and by the Linux world.
Mandrake has been in bankruptcy protection for some time now, is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Certainly. MandrakeSoft has been break-even since march 2003, and Mandrake 9.1 and Mandrake 9.2 have been very successful.
Our target is to leave the protection state by spring 2004.
Some people have been predicting a Linux breakthrough on the desktop for some years now. Do you think 2004 is going to be THE year?
It will certainly happen as soon as enough desktop applications will be available under Linux. But I'm not into predication :)
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Gaël Duval is Co-founder of [ Edit ]
