Great Deal on Mandrake!

[Nooyawkah]

A number of you were very helpful in helping me decide to try Linux. I have decided to go with Mandrake, $70 for the retail "Power Pack 8.2," almost everywhere. I really found a great deal at gogamer.com for $38 and figured I'd share it with you. It was delivered in 2 days, no problems.

http://www.gogamer.com/cgi-bin/GoGa...t/View/001LINP8

[sleddog]

http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart/0070010793?BjXpHqki;;87

But hey, you got yours in 2 days :)

[Nooyawkah]

Try this one

http://www.gogamer.com/cgi-bin/GoGamer.storefront/3d34e9730486f7882741d0fedee2073c/Product/View/001LINP8

[Nooyawkah]

To quote lisbob
"Buying the retail versions of Linux vs the downloads gives you all the programs without tieing up your bandwidth, online support from the distributer, and nifty manuals to help guide you thru the forest.

I'd say go for it, for literally a tenth of the price you'd pay for MS similar OS/products you get an awesome deal."

And Paleo Pete
"The main reason behind paying for any distro of Linux is to support its continued development. Yes, it's free and can be downloaded, but it is also made available in retail versions with a few extras to help with some sort of financial compensation for the people who have made and kept it free as well as worked to make it better with each new release."

These are 2 people whose judgement I trust.

[john5211]

Hi there,

So, I certainly respect Pete's judgment and opinion, and I'm glad that Nooyawkah found a distribution at a comfortable price, but...

If anyone is interested in supporting open source software in general and linux development in specific, they should probably send their money to GNU (http://www.gnu.org/) or one of the related projects (KDE, Gimp, whatever; there is a list (http://www.linux.org/projects/index.html) at linux.org). This way more money goes to programmers who are actually writing code (often on their own time) instead of retailers and corporations.

Don't get me wrong, there are many advantages to buying a distribution (iisbob's quote, for example), but if the goal is to support linux development, then I think money is better spent going directly to programmers and projects.

John