Can80 wrote:If you don't mind me asking, what made you stick with Mandriva/Mageia for all those years?
Back in the late '80s and '90s, I did development work on the Amiga. I also wrote a few magazine articles for Amiga publications, and I owned several Amiga computers. Well, Commodore died, and by 1997 I was forced to migrate away from my beloved Amigas; they were dead, could not be upgraded, and no longer would do my job.
I wanted to move to unix, but couldn't afford it. So, I tried slackware linux. It was hugely challenging for me; I did not know the environment at all, and building it was a major exercise. And when it was built, it just wasn't usable...too immature. And as for supportable??? OMG!
So, lacking a choice, I built the first iteration of this workstation, and put Windows NT on it. I never liked Windows, and I hated NT for a variety of reasons. The only thing positive I could say about NT was that it wasn't Windows 95 or 98.
After about a year, I decided I wanted to try linux again. So I went to a computer store and browsed the linux choices; Redhat, Mandrake, SUSE, one or two others. A bit of research suggested I wanted either Redhat or Mandrake, and I picked Mandrake 7.2 (in a retail package). I purchased a new hard drive for it, and installed it on my system in a dual-boot configuration with Windows NT. I played with it, and found it to be adequate. Rough around the edges, and lacking in software, but adequate for many things. I could not, at that time, use it for my work; the software didn't exist. So, I would boot into NT for work, then boot into Mandrake for play and for browsing.
Another year passed, I did a couple of updates to Mandrake, and now it was much better. KDE2 had become KDE3 and was much smoother. Everything worked better. So, I purchased Vmware Workstation Release 3, converted my Windows NT installation to a virtual machine, deleted the dual-boot setup, and was booting Linux with NT running as a VM (still using all the data on its hard drive) for work.
Since that time, I have always booted linux. I stuck with Mandrake because it was satisfactory, I have work to do, and distro-hopping gets in the way of work. When Mandriva died, I stayed with Mandriva 10.2 32 bit for a couple of years because I knew I had a reload coming, which is a lot of effort for me because my system had by that time become a rather large and complex linux system, and I just didn't want to do it.
When I finally did do it, I had 64 bit hardware in place, I had to do it because Mandriva 10.2 was too old and things were starting to break, and it was past time. I went to Mageia as the logical successor to Mandriva because it was probably the easiest migration. In fact, reloading 64 bit then getting my entire system running took several days. I had it booting and into my home environment in just a few hours, but all my customizations and servers and so forth...it was days. I am sure it would have been much more difficult to switch distros.
Since then I have found Mageia to be generally quite stable and mature. So why switch? I have work to do.
As I write this, in my Mageia host, I have Windows 10 64 bit running as a VM. I also have FreeBSD 8.4 running as a VM. I have Linux Mint 19, Linux Mint 20, and OpenSUSE 15.2 all running as VMs. I have a Mageia 7 VM running that I have customized to support some work we are doing for Nvidia, all running in Vmware Workstation 16.
I can still load and run that NT VM, though it complains now because it doesn't find its hard drive partitions other than its C drive (I virtualized those about 10 years ago, and they are available to my Windows 2000 VM which I still use occasionally).
So, I can (and do) distro-hop to my heart's content; I just fire them up in VMs and go.
This workstation is configured as a router, and has 3 ethernet connections. On one of the LANs, I presently have an x86-64 single board computer running our software product, and on the other LAN, I have a small ARM-based single board computer running the same product.
Mageia works generally quite well this way. I won't say I have not had trouble; the default Mageia installs are for desktop computers and tend to be highly automated - and this automation gets in my way quite a bit. But, generally, I am able to turn it off and configure the system the way I need it to be. So the built in Mageia tools are generally quite nice, the system is reliable and flexible, and it handles anything I throw at it - and I throw some pretty serious stuff at it sometimes. Why would I switch?