Mandriva is calling the community to be heard. this is the E-mail I sent them today.

The future and the difficult questions 

Good afternoon,The questions that are posed are difficult for a user like me, not a programmer, not technical, just a user of Mandriva and uses it since version 8, can answer. Anyway I’ll try to respond as constructively as I know.

1.who is in the community and want to (re)invest his time in the future and especially the distribution?I Still use Mandriva, and I’m thinking to keep using it as long as my hardware allows it. the effort I made is “selling” mandriva to my friends, in the web, supporting mandriva, talking about it, giving ideias to the developement of the distro. I’ll keep on doing that.

2.what interests you in the Mandriva Linux distribution, from a technical and human point of view?I started using Linux back in 1994. In that time installing and running linux was very hard. I started with slackware, passing to debian, red hat and finally Mandrake. In that that time Mandrake had a really cool name and style, and installed everything with ease, sound card, video card -  it was fantastic for a non tech guy.the troubled waters of Mandriva started with the Club thing and then with the problems around the name… Mandriva is not as charismatic as Mandrake but, it was still good and easy to install. MCC was an oasis in the Linux ecosystem. Then the buntuzilla arrived and lot’s of news users arrived. Gnome got a biggest and biggest fan base. KDE shifted and Mandriva started loosing ground, and reached a time that buying a powerpack or just using the Free/One was not a big difference - Why pay for it? some people I know always told me, I paid for Mandriva Powerpack to have some more software and mainly assistance, but that assistance is no good, in fact is bad.Straight to the question: I tried a lot of distros and mandriva is still the one with the best user harmony between easy and advanced features, has a lot’s of packages, and has some of the best home made tools in the linux ecosystem. the bad? communication and some news that are not well received - but that can be overdone. theres another thing that made me keep with Mandriva, and that is the origin - I’m european, not french, nor brazilian, but i’m european, and so Mandriva, and I’m Portuguese, so I have a historical connection with brazil.In the human point of view, I like the people I talk, i like most of the community spite of the troubled waters around the Mageia, Nepomuk, Rosa… etc…I really think that Mandriva should keep focus on Advanced and newbies, so, the install of mandriva should have a Simple and an advanced one. Old machines should be capable of running mandriva, so it has to have athe possibility to install other DE - I’ll sugest XFCE, has a good fan base and for long years Mandriva had a very good spin of it. Mandriva should follow the motto “Just works for all”

3.how would you like to get involved in the development of the distribution, in which form? My involvement is going to be in ideas,  evangelization, community unity effort, and Portuguese (Portugal) user conquest…Hope this helps. In my humble opinion to keep community committed with Mandriva, the company has to communicate more and call the community to act and to arms.And that for trying to keep the distro alive and not fleeing away…

Cordialement