I was a Mandrake user&#x2F;developer back then too. The blue colors and cartoonlike icons turned off many people, though they didn&#x27;t bother me. For years they were the most polished desktop distro.
Then Ubuntu came, with some more abstract colors and icons, and they were all the craze suddenly (I never understood why, to this day).<p>They always had problems financially. I don&#x27;t think there was ever a good business-plan that worked. Sometimes Powerpacks, the MandrakeClub, and also donations. They were always on the brink of disaster. I think in the end the investors were tired and pulled the plug.
They were quite big in France, in the military and governent departments. But apparently they don&#x27;t pay as well as the US pays Red Hat.<p>I still don&#x27;t know any distro that has an installer that is as good as Mandrake&#x27;s. And definitely no Mandrake Control Center thingie. Up to this day there is no equivalent to that. They had that nailed.
(I do pity the almost yearly rewrites of those as management demanded, and the bugs that came from it).
They were also the first distro with a list of pci id&#x27;s and vendor id&#x27;s, so drivers would be configured and loaded automatically. We now take it for granted, but this was non-existant on other distro&#x27;s, you always had to meddle with modprobe.conf.