Mageia Linux, good replacement for Ubuntu?

I'm running Mageia Linux in VirtualBox at the moment. Has anyone else tried it out? It's pretty good, easy to setup and run. It forked off from Mandriva after they fired some programmers and they decided to make their own distro that isn't reliant on the Mandriva company because it was having money and management problems.

I'm testing the Gnome version, it runs on Gnome 2.X, they did say Gnome 3 will be in the next Mageia release. It's not a bad distro, maybe it can gain more market share but it might take some time considering it just came out not too long ago.

Also if you are running Mandriva 2010 you can use the Mageia DVD to upgrade from Mandriva to Mageia : ) Not sure what the Mageia release cycle is, they didn't have it posted online yet. Wonder if it will be every six months like most distros?

It's worth trying out http://www.mageia.org if you are looking for an alternative to Ubunutu if you dislike Unity. Mageia uses RPM packages instead of Deb but I haven't had any problems with it, it pulls the dependences it needs without any issues. It also has a standard add/remove software program. Oh and it has an easy to configure firewall built in and a bootloader config program so you can choose what OS you want to boot on default. There is many other features in the Mageia Control Center. It's a nice addition.

I tried it out yesterday out of curiosity. I've always had a soft spot for Mandriva, considering how the first Linux distro I ever really liked was Mandrake 9 about ten years ago.

Not a bad distro at all. I tried the KDE version, and while I'm not a big fan of the theme Mageia uses (the same one used in Mandriva) that was easily changed.

Will I use it as my main distro? I dunno (I really like Fedora 15). I may keep it installed for a bit and see what happens and see what direction it takes. If Mageia turns into an awesome distro, then I can say, "I used it since version 1!" If it turns out to be crap, no harm, I can always find something else.

I really Like Mageia and Mandriva.... Mageia more because it is run by a community who's fate do not rest upon a company that need to please shareholders and make decisions for their Distrubution based upon business needs and Money making.... If the Distro is good and works well people will support it generously with Donations..... look at Mint

Anyways... I tried it and was quite impressed although I'm not a big fan of urpmi... it took literally about 5 mins + to get all the repos to add and update which was fkn annoying......... Also there was some software I couldn't find in any of the repos and I did not find any 3rd party repos equal to mandriva's (eg: MIB) repo etc...... correct me if i'm wrong..... Or maybe you can still add those repos but dunno if it would be a good idea or not.....

I wonder if mageia will continue to rebase on updated mandriva releases or go in their own direction? hmmmmm

I will give it another look at the next Major release once it gets off the ground and get's more improvements though for sure

kaddy wrote:Anyways... I tried it and was quite impressed although I'm not a big fan of urpmi... it took literally about 5 mins + to get all the repos to add and update which was fkn annoying......... Also there was some software I couldn't find in any of the repos and I did not find any 3rd party repos equal to mandriva's (eg: MIB) repo etc...... correct me if i'm wrong..... Or maybe you can still add those repos but dunno if it would be a good idea or not.....

I wonder if mageia will continue to rebase on updated mandriva releases or go in their own direction? hmmmmm

The "tainted" repo which is available but deactivated by default contains codecs, media players, and a few other things that aren't in the free and nonfree repos. To activate it, just go to the control center, select add/remove software, and configure software media sources (or something like that), and enable it. I think you would check both tainted release and tainted updates.

As for the future, I think they are going to continue independently now. The first release was just a rebranded Mandrivia 2010.2 with some updated packages, which the developers fully admit. The first release was just to get it going. Now that they are setup, I think they are going to pursue their own direction now. It will be interesting to see what happens.

What's the difference between this and PCLinuxOS? It looks to me like it's a pretty similar project.

Haven't tried it myself but I remember trying Mandriva 2010-something or other.

Thing that struck me about it besides being pretty and quite professional looking, was how surprisingly fast and smooth it was, even in a virtualbox.

I even had it on a proper hard drive install at one stage. I can't remember why I removed it though...either I got bored and went distro hopping again (most likely..LoL) or there was something I didn't like about it, but I can't remember what that could be.

I know with openSUSE, YAST(?) and the package manager in general seemed so slow it used to annoy me, whether it's similar to this I don't know.

Pclinuxos uses apt-get for Rpm's unlike mandriva and Mageia which use uprmi for it's package management. Have to say I prefer apt-get any day.... out of the two anyways

Can't wait to see Mageia grow and change though, It is definately in my top 5 fav distros