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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."
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.
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.
"Mandriva", which sounds like the name of a night club for french gay vampires.
Still a better love story than Twi...actually, that's almost the same story.
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!
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.
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!"
Considering Mandrake is a comic character, that's quite an achievement! ;)
But you're right, it was because of a lawsuit from the Hearst Corporation (their comic subsidiary also holds the rights to The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Popeye and a ton of other classic stuff).