They were the Ubuntu of their time. They ripped off another distro (RedHat, in their case) and made it easier to install (or just more free-as-in-beer, I don't remember)

I remember that they imploded soon afterwards. Wikipedia doesn't mention it, but I think it was some security f-up that turned everyone off.

Does anyone else remember that?

Yes I remember. A good distro from the golden age of Linux.
No, that isn't my recollection at all. Have you got a publicly verifiable source?
No that can't be true. If security f-ups turned people off, nobody would use Debian.

This OP doesn't deal in those...

Posted much the same thing at forums.debian.net last month : https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic....744928#p744928

I do it was my second after the Redhat 5.2 I bought I think the year before. It was March of 99 I got my high speed for the time connection of a wopping 150KB/s and never have used linux on a dialup connection. And that would have been around the time Win98SE came out that stopped my perfectly fine top of the line SB AWE64 Gold card from playing anything but a midi file in windows no matter the version installed after that nightmare. Well I had heard of and seen the Redhat on sale at local store bought it and installed then ran the sndconfig and shockingly I had sound for my videos and mp3 again. Moved on to the Mandrake shortly after that as it had the KDE pre-installed and that was a nightmare to try to get working on Redhat with the rpm hell. Still disliked the rpm hell in Mandrake at the time and found Debian when Woody came out in 2002 was thinking 03 but a quick search got the correct date. Despite the other poster disparaging it without the proof he requested from you being posted by him it has served me well these past twenty years. It was financial problems that eventually lead to its downfall the company could not sustain the outflow need to support all the things needed to keep it going as I remember it. Eventually the Mandriva folks took over as a community project.

I suspect the infamous Debian OpenSSL blunder of 2008 is what is being referred to? I'm not not sure, but I assumed rkelson's point related to that - and that incident not putting people off Debian.

As with the 2011 breach of kernel.org: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/...rg-worry-world

Could be possible been so long I forgot about that, I guess that is what a damn good rock solid distro does for you, allow you to forget people are human and make the occasional mistake. Overall I think they have done damn good on security unlike some who seem to be in a concerted effort to undermine the confidence in it. Like the garbage Debian is on the same level as XP with security thread I have seen pop up from time to time or the kernel.org person saying Redhat is better than Debian trash thread making the rounds lately too...

I was taking a cheap shot.

When were you using Mandrake? This must have happened around 1999-2001. By 2008 I forgot Mandrake had existed. I only remembered it now, when I saw this forum.

If there was a viable alternative to Debian, I think their security f-up would have consequences too.

Mandrake may not exist any longer but there are a number of OS's which are based on it described at the link below. I used PCLinuxOS for 10 years with rarely a problem.

https://www.makeuseof.com/best-alter...andriva-linux/

Yeah probably around that time.

I never used it for anything serious... Just tinkered with it for a while. I remember being impressed with Mandrake's default configs for supermount. But I didn't think much of the installer. They had quite clearly tried as hard as they could to "dumb it down," and that annoyed me.

I remember Mandrake. I installed it and could never get the sound to work, couldn't get my dailup connection to work even though I was using an external U.S. Robotics hardware modem. All I could get was an over abundance of lame lying bogus excuses and no support what so ever.

I installed them fairly early (1995?). Yeah, they were a bit of a disaster support wise, but so was everybody. Linux was still in development, and gnu was suddenly required to come of age and handle a whole lot of horrible hardware.

I became a Mandrake Crashtester. I learned loads. I had a motherboard with the infamous MVP3 "Hardware Fault." They in fact contorted the BIOS settings to suit the (rather awful) Creative sound cards then. But I got support that way. I got the impression Mandrake were going broke around 2000 and wasn't surprised they died. Never heard of any security issue - they were repackaging Red Hat.

It was the first Linux distro I ever installed, sometime in 1999. I could never get any form of Linux to run flawlessly then, or for years after that, but I would still tinker with it on occasion. It wasn't until about 2008 that I ever got any useful work out of any Linux, but I wanted to learn it because I was never happy with Windows. The first distro I ever ran regularly was Mandrake's first descendant, PCLinuxOS. I came back to it again in 2018, so I guess in a sense, my first distro still lives on here. Still has some of the same features, like the Control Center, too.

I was glad to see when The Register featured the four surviving Mandrake/Mandriva family distros in an article last month.

By 1999, I was still on a shoestring but had two pcs. One was a dos/w98/linux laptop which was purely business and me. The other had this awful SiS 6326 video card in it. The other was for protection - to keep games and my kids away from my box.

At the time, every video card had 16 video modes pre-programmed from the get-go, but not this. So I needed to install linux in text mode, which narrowed the field!

Back in those days I was Stormixing. The first real package manager. Some guy named Ian turned me on to that kit.