"I was lucky enough to work with François Bancilhon, who was CEO of Mandriva for about 6 years https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23410 https://www.linked

"I was lucky enough to work with François Bancilhon, who was CEO of Mandriva for about 6 years https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23410 https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23410 (I worked with him at Data-Publica)." Indeed you were lucky. Mandriva really was a great distro. I started using it in 2005/2006 and with gnome bridged the gap in terms of usability and ease of use. You can see it in use here: - https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/117923430/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/117923430/ The thing that killed my enthusiasm, was cost then the usability started getting in the way. Historicy buffs will geek out on the fact I started using Mandriva at the same time as I found Aarons python framework, web.py [0]. Up till three months ago, the lessons I learned using Mandriva and webpy allowed me to hack 200 lines of python and run it as my blog on Google AppEngine for a measly $USD10/year from 2007 to 2015. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878 https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878 Not long after that I switched to a new distro called Ubuntu. They even mailed the disks, at no cost. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/115063638/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/115063638/ Long live Mandriva. [0] http://webpy.org/ http://webpy.org/ and http://www.aaronsw.com/ http://www.aaronsw.com/