Mageia 10 - Cauldron - Suggestions for improvements -

[thealio]

Hi,

I'm trying Mageia Cauldron with xfce desktop

It works great, however, I've some suggesions that I think it would be great to see applied on Mageia 10 and next releases

- Packaging dependencies changes.
The distro has some packaging choices that are not logical , with mageia default xfce settings

- Dash and Bash are both shipped as shells, I cannot uninstall dash , because it's resulting chained with kernel-desktop-6.12.62-5 package . It would be better to separate dash from the kernel, and shipping only bash as shell on mageia 10

- mate-polkit : uninstalling it bring as marked to be uninstalled also some imprtant packages as dependencies , as xfce4-session , userdrake and all the mageia tools. This has no sense to me since user should be able to replace the polkit tool. I would prefer lxpolkit as polkit for xfce , or xfce-polkit, already avaiable on some distros, like Debian.

- The settings of the xfce-applications.menu file are customized for Mageia, but with the distro's icons an with not-standard customizations, reverting them to the default would make the users more like at home

Long story short, the packaging for xfce and other environments in general should be more modular

- There are some application icons , like the remove-old-kernels application icon and draknetcenter , that points to not standard paths , so custom icon themes will not be applied ; it would be better to use the standard path for mageia's applications in general.

- Dropping gtk2 and qt5 , replacing programs compiled using those tookits with gtk3 and qt6 should be done

- Default browser : the times of old secure and privacy friendly Firefox are ended, I would recommend switching to brave , librewolf or firedragon as default web browsers , openmandriva is also testing helium as default browser


Regarding a technical point of view, on the road for Mageia 11 , after Mageia 10 release :

- urpmi is great , but dnf is modern , and the two packages have some confilcts if both used by users (as orphans management).
In my opinion, replace urpmi with an hard fork of dnf and adapt the mageia's tools to this fork would be the best choice , It would make Mageia more stable and modern

- I would like the adoption of openzl to mageia's rpm packages, if possible, and adapt the whole environmet to this
https://engineering.fb.com/2025/10/06/d ... framework/

- introducing more expert linux users tools , like terminal tools and windows managers, would be appreciated.

- I would like to set xlibre as standard x11 server, it's currently well maintained and it receives updates with fix and improvements

[morgano]

Some of this is/have been discussed.
More hands are welcome.
You could start participate, join dev and QA, and search our bugzilla to learn about things discussed, and open new bugs.

[thealio]

Thank you for your reply

I would like to join Dev and QA , and give some help if I can,

How can I do?

I cannot subscribe to the mailing list, because I receive an error on the browser

[morgano]

Start here for an overview:
https://www.mageia.org/en/contribute/
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Contributing
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mailing_lists
Also, practise searching our bugzilla. It is interesting to see what is/have been going on, and learn the process.

I cannot subscribe to the mailing list, because I receive an error on the browser

What did you try and what was the error?

[thealio]

Another change I would make to mageia 11 , would be the adoption of another init system, different from systemd

Many users would like this, and Mageia would provide a real alternative among rpm distros.
I use Artix + dinit and Void (runit) and also Devuan, they works pretty well, and the system is snappy, the init management is not hard at all , especially with dinit


removed quote. ~Germ

[morgano]

Other users prefer that things are well known and proven - and they not need to learn something new replacing something that worked well.
I think there are more important things to use man-hours on.

[thealio]

The userbase that reqiring traditional linux management (expecially regarding init system) is growing constantly.

Things like openrc and runit are well tested , documented and working . Some idependendent and appreciated distros like Void and Alpine have in a traditionali init usage their sstronger point.

A traditional init altrenative to systemd would be a good choice form a technical standpoint (more simpilcity, more speed) and would help Mageia to gain new users, there are many users searching alternatives to the predominant systemd init.

MX offer the possibiliy to choose between systemd and Sysvinit , this could also be an option

PCLinucOS is an rpm distro that uses Sysvinit

So , in my opinion , providing a traditional init system with the relesase of Cauldron post Mageia 10 , an on Mageia 11 , would be a winning choiche , it would help Mageia to grow as community and userbase, and also a techical good choice

Personally , I'm one of the users that is using and focusing primary on no systemd inits , there are many many others , of course, there are other that don't care , but intermediate / advanced user are looking with interest init systems other than systemd

[thealio]

Start here for an overview:
https://www.mageia.org/en/contribute/
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Contributing
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mailing_lists
Also, practise searching our bugzilla. It is interesting to see what is/have been going on, and learn the process.

I cannot subscribe to the mailing list, because I receive an error on the browser

What did you try and what was the error?

Hi

the subscription error was my fault, i didn't login in before subscribing, now the issue is gone

Thank you