Unlike other folks, I did not have a particularly positive experience installing Mageia beta 1 (x86_64)...
I began with a simple install in VirtualBox. No issues to report. However, once I moved to do an actual install on my test rig, things went downhill quickly.
Installer bugs
There are at least three bugs in the installer...
(And rightly or wrongly, the installer is where any distro makes its "first impression"):
- Bug 49. (Yes, 501 is still a number)
(This bug is massively disprutive to users, and it is utterly trivial to fix. It would be a blessing if it got fixed before the release of "beta" 2.)
- Required package "shorewall" was not found (and thus I had no firewall).
- The installer spontaneously shuts down when installing the bootloader (reproduced three times). I can go back and complete the install by rebooting and using the "upgrade" feature. However, as a practical matter, I would not do so if I were evaluating a distro for actual use.
The only thing even remotely unusual about the machine where I did the test install is that it is admittedly overpopulated with Linux distros. (It's my test machine, after all, and it's got maybe a dozen different distros installed in various partitions.)
Update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation (with KDE 4.5)
An update to an existing Mandriva 2010 installation installed without incident. User accounts with relatively "vanilla" KDE desktops seemed to work fine after the update. However, one user account, which made extensive use of multiple activities, was subject to literally constant plasma crashes. (Needless to say, that system was reverted to its pre-update status.)
One last note: the algorithm that estimates installation time could use some attention. The upgrade was performed on an admittedly low-powered (Atom) machine, but the estimated times varied wildly--from a low of 1 hour, to a high of 7 (!) hours. The update actually took something over 90 minutes, but seeing an estimated 7-hour update time might motivate a user to stop the install and look elsewhere.
The one high point is that Mageia is the first distro to correctly identify an AirLink WiFi dongle and load the correct firmware/kernel driver. A good and happy thing.