I received an announcement today on the Lycoris mailing list stating that Mandriva (formerly MandrakeSoft, creators of Mandrake Linux) have acquired Lycoris. Lycoris was started by Joseph Cheek in an effort to create a user friendly, Linux environment that was “easy for everyone”.

I actually bought the Lycoris system back when it was Redmond Linux – before the name change. I had taken cursory looks at it and thought they were on the right track. The main thing I didn’t like about it was the use of the KDE Desktop Environment. For some reason, I just find GNOME a much more comfortable environment to use.

For some reason, neither one of these distributions really caught on with me. I went from Debian to Redhat, with a brief stint of using Suse exclusively (version 9.0-9.2) before moving to Fedora, which I am very comfortable with and have been using since late last year.

That said though, it’s cool to see a guy start a company with good intentions and be bought without having gone bankrupt. I wish Lycoris luck under their new ownership. I’m definitely curious to see what new products come out of the merger.