Mandriva 2011 Linux Release Finally Comes

While the Mandriva Linux distribution lost most of its charm when many of the developers left to form Mageia Linux and the remaining stakeholders switched to just doing one official release per year, the 2011 final release was published on Sunday.

While Mandriva no longer carries the popularity it did in its early days or back in the Mandrake days, the 2011.0 release is an improvement. Mandriva 2011.0 provides the mandriva Package Manager (a new package manager under heavy development), MandrivaSync (a cloud service for Mandriva that's similar to DropBox, iCloud, and Ubuntu One), LibreOffice 3.4, and adopts the system service manager.

Mandriva 2011.0 is a bit conservative on the packaging side with incorporating the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and KDE SC 4.6.5, among other slightly older packages. Mandriva 2011.0 packages (and all future Mandriva releases) are now using RPM5 packages rather than RPM4.

Mandriva 2011.0 also introduces the PiTiVi video editor, replaces DigiKam with the Shotwell photo manager, incorporates KNetworkManager, and guts out KDE's Amarok for the Clementine music player instead. KMail has also been ditched for Mozilla Thunderbird.

Read more in the brief release announcement while more details can be found from the 2011.0 release notes.