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Mageia 3 Released
Freshly Exhumed writes "Forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, Mageia Linux has hit a new release milestone. Trish at the Mageia blog announces: 'All grown up and ready to go dancing: Mageia 3's out! We still can't believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we've been doing it for two and a half years. For people who can't wait, get it here; release notes are here. To upgrade from Mageia 2, see here.'" Adds reader hduff: "It offers cutting edge and stable versions of your favorite applications and desktop environments as well as a version of the STEAM gaming software."
Am I the only one who thought this was the name of a game?
Some people are happy to make something useful and find that activity to be great and interesting. Maybe your definition of fun include "posting snarky comment under no one name on a web site", and yet, that's your choice ( albeit a less weird one, everybody does it, so I can see why you think the easy way is much funnier ).
I may be wrong, but I think the french-based original Mandriva was almost dying one year ago, for various reasons among which a basic economic one (founders split and close to bankrupcy, not reactive...). they apparently turned to other customers than the average end-user.
I did use Mandriva seriously 3 years ago then dropped it on the occasion of an update deleting everything and not recovering from the backup...
Mandriva was cooler than Ubuntu, actually automating many hardware handling, and less hegemonic -I'm going to look seriously into Mageia, yes.
Herve S.
There are so many forks to so many distros out there, the goal of getting a lot of people to coalesce around one distro so Linux can gain some momentum becomes a pipe dream. (as if it wasn't already)
I think it's probably a case of egos more than anything
Each Linux distribution is a different business entity, with different customers. Do you really believe that there should be only one Sirius Cybernetics Corporation that makes everything (badly)?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Your problem is assuming that the linux community wants all distributions (or even applications) to consolidate.
We don't.
Forking a distro usually happens when one of the people working on it doesn't feel they are "in charge" enough, and they want to be "the boss," so they go off and create "their own" little fiefdom to rule over.
Rap music could just as easily have been named after "Rapture" by Blondie. The man from Mars is eating cars
Some do, obviously. There is value to consolidation.
The key question here is "what is the point?" If there is a point, then that point is the answer. If there isn't a point. Then indeed the distro is nothing but another point in the charts of desktop Linux fragmentation. It is bad for desktop Linux as a whole, it makes Linux less attractive as a platform.
On the other hand desktop Linux is so fragmented already that it's nothing serious, and the Mageia are having so much fun by their own admition, that Mageia turns out to be a positive thing overall.
Now if the Mageia guys could have fun making a better interface for the GIMP or optimizing LibreOffice, that would be much better for desktop Linux. But you can't choose what makes you have fun.
But... the future refused to change.
The reason for the fork was the Mandriva fired all their French developers, moved production to a cheaper country and then totally broke the distribution (Mandriva 2011.0).
The original programmers took the Mandriva 2010.x distribution, forked it, updated it and made the Mageia (mage-ee-ah) 1 distribution, which actually worked.
Mageia 2 moved to systemd (*spit*) but generally didn't break backwards compatibility. I've been running the pre-release version of Mageia 3 on a server for the last month or so (because the chipset needed a newer kernel than previous releases had) and it's been very stable.
Subsequently, Mandriva's management have had a small rethink and are now basing their server distribution upon Mageia (because it actually works).
Of all the Linux distributions I've found the Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia family to be the least primitive and actually work, both in a scientific computing desktop role and a server roll. They're generally hassle free and the update and upgrade system practically flawless.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
As a Mageia packager, I can report that it was indeed really fun and enriching working on Mageia 3.
We have to thank the whole friendly community, which provided code, tests, reports, fixes, documentation, translations, comments and donations. Our goal is to make a great community distribution for everyone, with an emphasis on the ease of use and on empowering users and making them part of a community.
We hope you'll like it if you give it a try!
Now let's start the work on support and on Mageia 4.
Mageia 2 moved to systemd (*spit*) but generally didn't break backwards compatibility.
I don't really get the point of systemd, it seems like change for its own sake. Can anyone offer an alternative perspective?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It seems mostly to be a "me too" bragging right. MacOS has launchd, Solaris has svc.configd so someone thought that Linux needed one too.
On the whole it's also trying to boot marginally quicker, but not necessarily correctly. i.e. play fast and loose.
Let's face it, does it really matter if a server or desktop takes 20 seconds rather 30 seconds to boot if the machines going to have an uptime for several weeks?
Wouldn't it be better that it is guaranteed to be running correctly after 30 seconds rather than having services try to start up before the rest of the system is ready for them and failing?
Well, obviously I'm not hip and trendy enough and think that shiny-shiny is no substitute for correctly working.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Especially now some core KDE development is paid for by Blue Shell in stead of Canonical things are even better.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
On the whole it's also trying to boot marginally quicker, but not necessarily correctly. i.e. play fast and loose.
I do gather that was a supposed advantage. I've been a bit baffled, since mostly the boot scripts were terribly written. Compare the (e.g.) pre systemd boot times of Arch compared to ubuntu for example.
Why did my arch netbook runnung basically the same services boot vastly faster than my quad i7 ubuntu laptop?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I've been a tester (and Mageia user) since before Mageia 1 was released, having decided to take the plunge in the new forked distro instead of staying with Mandriva.
I think the distro is working well especially considering it's small community. Only recent "controversial" changes have been like changing the log files from easy read text files to binary rubbish, but I think many distros are doing that now, and using the new Grub2 still needs some ironing out of small issues.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I may be wrong, but I think the french-based original Mandriva was almost dying one year ago
You aren't wrong, and neither is the symptom very new. I seem to remember the more originally original Mandrake begging for donations to keep it afloat back in 2001. Maybe I'm blind or stupid, but if they can keep dying for that long, there must be a workable business model in that.
Except that wasn't the purpose of systemd. The point was that every distro wrote their very own crappy bash scripts to handle starting and stopping processes, and that every single daemon needed to duplicate functionality for handling reloading, etc. And then you have the hack of inetd to do exactly the same thing as the SYSV init system, but dynamically for internet daemons. Systemd started as a rethink of the whole way of handling starting and stopping daemons so that any one could be started dynamically, and to also not require a bash interpreter (which is slow, cumberbose, and requires messy scripts that all duplicate the same damn thing).
I think systemd has gone off the rails with the whole "core OS" bullshit. Still, the original premise was logical and it was good... at first. They just couldn't leave well enough alone and then decided every single core process belongs in their source repository to prevent any deviation in startup between distros. Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if the next thing they absorb is a package manager.
The base issue is that they hired a "manager" who didn't want to use any type of linux personally, and focused on cost reduction "while selling" not taking in account that once all the "expensive" people left there would not be anything to sell. Another issue is the disconnect between the interest of the company, or the investors and of the people representing the investors within the investment fund. ex: I buy a hot startup for 10 Million, the VC gets 5% (cheap) of 10M yearly "management fee" (maybe paid now, maybe delayed pay). The hot startup is not so hot goes down to 1M Option A) the VC sells right now and gets at least 1M, for the fund manager it's "game over", and no cigar (lost money you see) (at least for this revenue stream) Option B) the VC waits a little bit more, the fund manager gets what ever % of the "management fee" is paid up front, and gets to play one more year... guess what is the fund manager's prefered choice.
Forking a distro usually happens when one of the people working on it doesn't feel they are "in charge" enough, and they want to be "the boss," so they go off and create "their own" little fiefdom to rule over.
In my experience it's usually the opposite. When the current dictator in charge refuses input from a large group of contributors, is abusive or otherwise tries to exploit the free labor being contributed to the project. Take XF86 for example and how that debacle ended up. Take OpenOffice.
A lone person not feeling like they are in control enough, as you say, isn't enough to create a fork. There has to be people behind him/her and willing to contribute to the fork. Take OpenBSD as an example of that or Cinnamon.
Well that is certainly a Grade A analysis.
Take a look at Mageia's web site(s)/blogs where the history and rationale for the fork in 2010 is spelled out for all to see. It's been almost three years, dude.
Also, you have the question backwards. It is: "What is the point of not forking distros?"
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I'm generally an openSUSE/PCBSD/Bodhi guy, but I just wiped the computer clean last week and thought I'd take the opportunity to install something new, for fun. I installed Mageia 2, not realizing it was about to be replaced.
Conclusion: good distro! It installed cleanly/easily, had a good-looking KDE4 desktop with sensible defaults, and was intuitive and easy to use. The DVD came with a lot of software on it, but once I initialized the repositories I was able to find every package i need except one.
To the haters out there asking 'what's the point' I'd say it's a distro that's kind of a sure thing if you give it to a friend to install. They've done sensible, methodical, professional work and it shows. It's avoided going insane like Ubuntu, has tools that make configuration pretty straight forward, and was easy to use. "But it's no different than any other distro!" I'd say these days there's not a huge amount of software being written for Linux so increasingly all the distros are starting to look the same. It's not that different from Ubuntu but Ubuntu is not really that different from Fedora or openSUSE or Crunchbang or whatever.
They're also building a pretty good quality, constructive and helpful community - that counts a lot. Their forums are useful and full of helpful people, all there for a reason.
Good distro, would install again. A+
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
All went down the drain when they changed the name from mystical "Mandrake" to "Mandriva", which sounds like the name of a night club for french gay vampires.
They had to change from Mandrake for copyright reasons. At the same time, they acquired a "-iva" named Brazian distro and combined the names. When the asshats running Mandriva were about to tank the distro, many developers jumped ship and named the new spinoff Mageia, carrying on the Mandrake-ish "magic" theme. None of them ever claimed to be marketing geniuses and histiory has validdated that. It's a shame for such a good, solid distro.
Here's some more background on what makes Mageia unique.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.com/2013/01/mageia3-beta-vs-fedora18.html
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