He was an incredibly smart and cultivated man, and it makes me sad to see Mandriva go down, it was a beautiful and successful project (at least for a while).
I am very thankful for all the hard work people put in these fantastic projects
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:
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.
He was an incredibly smart and cultivated man, and it makes me sad to see Mandriva go down, it was a beautiful and successful project (at least for a while).
I am very thankful for all the hard work people put in these fantastic projects