Slashdot Mirror

If they like "Red Hat/Fedora done better", they will also like Mageia. It's progenitor was Mandrake, a "red Hat done better" distro.

download link https://www.mageia.org/en/6/

>"The guy built mandrake. You have to keep this in mind when making your judgements :)"

I am not sure what you mean by that, since Mandrake was wildly popular and, at the time, one of the best overall Linux distros. From Mandrake came Mandriva, and from that, Mageia... which is, itself, very impressive (in fact, I am using it right now).

https://distrowatch.com/table....
http://www.mageia.org/en/

Great default settings, excellent hardware support, easy-to-use, nice graphic system tools, friendly community support. The Mageia6 release in almost ready to release, but I've been using it for quite a while without problems. As nice as it is, I'm surprised it doesn't get more attention; it deserves the attention.

They provide install DVDs and a Live DVD (Just don't install from the live DVD. Dues to size limitations of the DVD media, some useful packages are left out of the live DVD.)
https://www.mageia.org/en/6/

Since Mageia is a fork from already very user friendly Mandriva and has a very friendly community and forums, nice and translated documentation I also found it very easy to use. I even install it for some non-techies and they still use it without any complain. I just showed them how to update if there is an update icon in tray for it.

They also have a strong and very dedicated QA team. They even write advisories regularly which is very very rare in independent distros.

Since Mageia is a fork from already very user friendly Mandriva and has a very friendly community and forums, nice and translated documentation I also found it very easy to use. I even install it for some non-techies and they still use it without any complain. I just showed them how to update if there is an update icon in tray for it.

They also have a strong and very dedicated QA team. They even write advisories regularly which is very very rare in independent distros.

Since Mageia is a fork from already very user friendly Mandriva and has a very friendly community and forums, nice and translated documentation I also found it very easy to use. I even install it for some non-techies and they still use it without any complain. I just showed them how to update if there is an update icon in tray for it.

They also have a strong and very dedicated QA team. They even write advisories regularly which is very very rare in independent distros.

Since Mageia is a fork from already very user friendly Mandriva and has a very friendly community and forums, nice and translated documentation I also found it very easy to use. I even install it for some non-techies and they still use it without any complain. I just showed them how to update if there is an update icon in tray for it.

They also have a strong and very dedicated QA team. They even write advisories regularly which is very very rare in independent distros.

I used Mandrake/Mandriva from 2000 to around 2013. As far as I know, there are at least three "forks":

Mageia (which I use now: I personally think it's great, and a big improvement on Mandriva): http://www.mageia.org/en/

PCLinuxOS: never used it, so can't comment on what it's like: don't know if this is classed as a true "fork": http://www.pclinuxos.com/

OpenMandriva: again, never used it, so can't comment, and again, not sure if this is a "fork" as such: https://www.openmandriva.org/e...

Try Mageia: you may well find you like it!

It pretty much is. Everyone I knew that used Mandriva switched to Mageia, including myself.

http://www.mageia.org/

It is consistently in the top 4 on distrowatch. Mandriva is something like #46 now.

It's coming back in 5.1, in a different, more general form.

For the time being there are two menu installed by default in Plasma 5: Kickoffa "modern" launcher, and Kicker a more classic menu-style launcher.
For the time being you have to switch manually from one to the other.

"Anyone know a polished linux distribution that could hold the candle after Ubuntu croaks "

I don't know a comparable one, but I do know at least two that are far, far better.

I never did like Gnome, but I've been running kubuntu and it looks like I'll be going back to Mandriva. I always did like Mandriva and only switched because it looked like it was dying. Maybe Canonical will come to their senses in time.

You might want to take a look at Mageia, then. It's a healthy, free, and libre fork of Mandriva (which staggered onto the dark side of commercialism, bleeding from all discernible orifices).

I have been a Mandriva user for more than a decade, and continue to use it today, though I will switch to Mageia in a few days since Mandriva has announced that they are turning their support over to the user community and Mageia (a Mandriva fork) releases version 2 on May 22nd. I have also used many other distributions as well, including Gentoo, Fedora, CentOS. I didn't answer the question because it was clear that the person who was challenging me to reveal it was simply looking for an argument and it wouldn't matter what answer I gave (as I expect I am about to confirm when I hit submit.)

It is not about "cloning the distro". Anyone can download the tree in its current state. The value added is in the talent that maintains the codebase, makes improvements, applies the latest security updates, implements bugfixes, and helps the product evolve. In the case of Mandriva, there is Mageia, which is made up of many of the maintainers from Mandriva who have anticipated trouble and decided to break away from Mandriva. In other words, Mandriva the company can die, and Mandriva the product essentially lives on as Mageia.

I have been with Mandriva since version 9, it was the distro I picked which got me into Linux, so have been with the distro for a lot of years now. However since the beta of Mageia 1 came out, I jumped ship - I didn't want to deal with Mandriva's new menu system for a start.

The problem I see with a shareholder revolt is, the company should have found a way to not fire their main developers in the first place. Now they are working on the community Mageia Linux version, and who is left at Mandriva?

IMO if they wanted a better distro, you should get more people to bother to report bugs so they can be investigated, not think someone else has found it. This should be made easy for non technical users so that others with more experience may try re-creating the bug. The various distro webpages to report a bug are way over the top for a new person to understand and report a bug.

I myself among now lots of others reported various Nouveau free nVidia driver issues where there are problems if you want to switch to the real nVidia driver to get 3D. Stuff like Compiz, Google Earth, or BZFlag won't work with the Nouveau driver.... but 2D stuff works fine with Nouveau.

I was a Mandrake/Mandriva guy for years. Before Ubuntu, it was THE "newbie" distro. It's still very user-friendly.

Once all this uncertainty started about a year ago, I switched to Mageia, which is a community fork of Mandrake.

Did you give Mageia a try?

It's developed by most of the people who worked for Mandriva and they care a lot about UI consistency (at least for what I know)

I'm very happy with them, all the config are easy to find and easy to set.

From first-hand experience (been using the 2011 RC2 for a couple of weeks), I can tell you... yes. Switch. Everything outside KDE is half working. What more, they are killing off all the drake tools, so by the next release this distro will be indistinguishable from any other generic distro.

I was going to install it on my parents' computers as soon as it came out, but the effort (and time... the ISO does not contain any GNOME package, so I would have to download the hundreds of MB again and again) is not worth it.

Right now I'm keeping an eye at Mageia.

Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro that is changing their UI, the forthcoming release of Mandriva will change theirs as well.... http://www.jzkretail.com/mandriva-2011-beta-2/ Why change the desktop to look like a netbook install?

At least those that use Mandriva will have a choice, they can jump to the new community fork Mageia which does not have these UI changes (Mageia currently in Beta testing, and from what I've tested of it, it works well).

Except now people are starting to wake up and realize that as well. It is a buggy bloated distro that got lucky because they mailed cd's to people. However now people are starting to realize Fedore and Mandriva exist. It's that simple.

Mandriva doesn't exist anymore. The company went broke again. http://www.mageia.org/en/ is the replacement if it works out.

I would suggest Mageia