Some thoughts about what is special about Mageia

[jimg]

Recently I had occasion to rediscover an appreciation for Mageia. Please indulge a few thoughts.

A little context: Mandrake was the distro that got me going in 2000 and GNU/Linux has been my daily driver ever since. (However, I'm not an expert administrator.)

Unfortunately I ran into one too many quality issues over the years and decided to try other distros. However, I've never lost affection for Mageia. Recently,
I recovered an old laptop I'd given my mother, a ZAReason from 2012 with Ubuntu installed; she moved to a newer laptop several years ago. It was running extremely slowly, probably because of the many Snap packages installed. I cleaned the hard drive, then decided to install Mageia just for fun. It made an enormous difference, and now it's quite a nice laptop.

This caused me to reflect on why I'm still interested in Mageia. What makes it special? It has a combination of features that are rare to find all together:

• It's a community project.
• It's intended to be welcoming to beginners, both as a community and as software.
• Moreover, it is helpful to beginners by making technical details accessible and documented, rather than by hiding them behind some metaphor.
• It's mostly agnostic to the desktop environment. Thus it's a great platform for trying out DE's. This is in contrast to a trend for some years now of distros focusing on a single DE.
• It has GUI configuration tools for just about everything.
• It has a great installer. It usually gets things mostly right relative to the hardware it finds.
• Also it tends to install a pretty efficient system. (Between this and being DE agnostic, Mageia can breathe life into old computers.)
• urpmi is easy to use and understand.
• It segregates Free/Libre/Open-source packages from proprietary ones, making it easy to use Free software if you want to, but if you need to use a proprietary driver to get a computer working, it's available.

There are very few distros that meet all of these features. For instance, Debian is desktop-agnostic and is a community project, but is not oriented towards beginners, nor does it have GUI configuration tools. Other distros are intended for non-expert users but focus on a single DE. Perhaps the closest analog is OpenSuSE.

Accordingly, I'd like to offer my thanks to the whole team for making Mageia what it is.

It occurred to me that the docket of troubleshooting issues that I have currently, which have kept me from recommending Mageia to others (for fear they would run into similar issues), is not so very long. I'll see if I can get those taken care of. And I'll do what I can to contribute, being the non-expert that I am.

-Jim

[isadora]

Thank you Jim for your fine report.

I'm in the same boat as yours and can fully agree to all the points you describe.
Even my mother of 93 uses Mageia on her laptop, though only for YT and card-game.

[morgano]

Thank you for that view, and future contribution.
Remember it is good to be a non expert, to ask the questions other people also wonder about, and seeking, asking, and documenting.

[xboxboy]

For me it's the community thing too: And again, I started with Mandrake.

But beyond that, MCC is king, and the fact that in 'my' view of the world, Mageia stays true to what Linux/unix is about.

A secure system, that empowers users with user land tools, but preserves admin for admin ONLY.

The use of sudo as default in many distro's drives me up the wall! 'Sudo this' 'Sudo that'.... What a nightmare.
Inexperienced people using admin tools for daily tasks... It's just begging for broken systems.

Oh! And a firewall by default: I had to use an arm image of another distro recently.... no firewall installed by default: C'mon, really? It's 2025, storage, ram and cpu cycles are ample for a default firewall.... SMH

[Telemex]

I agree with what has been said above.
Mageya is a great distribution. I've been using it almost since its release, since the first versions.
It is a system that just works, works, works without any significant problems or failures.
Over the many years of my life, as a user, I have encountered a variety of operating systems from ZX-Spectrum, SP/M-80, MS-DOS, OS/2 to all sorts of Windows and Linux. And honestly, Mageia is currently one of the best operating systems in terms of all its advantages and minor shortcomings.
Many thanks to all the developers of the distribution for an excellent product. I hope version 10 will not be an exception!