by yankee495 » May 30th, '12, 10:39
A friend ask me for Linux. I got Mandriva 2011 for him. We didn't play with ROSA much but I didn't like it (might change my mind with more time). I really like Mageia, and it has its faults as does all distros. But it seems to me Mageia trying to go back to the Mandrake days without sacrificing or adding too much eye candy, but retaining the customization, stability, and functionality expected from an OS these days. Mageia has been highly stable for me. Compiz is not working right and I understand that to be related to KDE, but even with Conpiz freezing the desktop, the core & kernel has never crashed.
There will never be an OS that everyone thinks is perfect. In my opinion Win7 is the best Windows ever but what a mess with DRM etc. XP didn't have all that stuff. Windows 8 looks like it is going to be all over the map and rumor has it they are going to block alternative browsers for "Security Reasons". What? IE is secure? Do tell...the world!
I'm not against ROSA as an option and I thought in the beginning of Ubuntu & Kubantu, splitting up the distro like that would be the death of them. Mint is now #1 on distrowatch and since the release of Mageia 2 , Mageia is #2, so someone is doing something right.
I had not been following the Linux community very close when I seen Mageia moving up the list. I thought "They better be pretty good to get me to switch from Mandriva!". Well here I am and more interested than ever in the fate of this Distro!
I'm also a KDE man...I just like the layout of the task bar (panel), start button (launcher) and control panel (MCC).
Way back, before I knew about Linux at all...I had a wish...I wished I had an OS that was so flexible that I could make it look how ever I wanted and run anything I wanted. Linux is almost that. I say almost because not enough manufactures support it directly and I, for the past 10 years, do not buy products from companies that do not actively support it(try not to).
People use Windows because it works, for the most part and it is already installed when they buy their computer. They are not going to buy a new car and change the motor. You can do this with Linux.
The success of the Mac proves with financial backing a Unix type Desktop OS could rule the market. Apples hardware & inflated prices holds them back.
I'm not saying there should not be choice. On the contrary, and I love my choice of Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia! And I don't put down Gnome, or Suse, Redhat or any of the others. I even thought about taking Mint for a spin, but I found Mageia!
I'll stop here before I get a MS/Linux/Distro/Gnome/KDE flame war going. My point is choice and Linux provides that. I'm sure someone will take the ROSA stuff and package it for Mageia. I'm from the DOS days when a Unix system was astronomical in price...Oh how I wish I could've had access to it back in the 80's.
I'm even going to get into programming which I have not done since before my DOS days. I used BASIC and assembly and at the time had a young family and just couldn't afford the tools to learn C, Cobol, Fortran and the many other options.
Happy configuring!