Having used Mageia for a long time, and also contributing to development of FontForge and other applications I can give you some perspective.
Back in the past, the main distros anyone really knew were Debian, Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake.
Mandrake concentrated on the desktop and user ease of use.
Debian concentrated on stability
Redhat and SuSE concentrated on leading and bleeding edge.
Today, there are a lot of distros available, but from a development point of view, I look at it this way...
RedHat runs a more stable cycle for businesses (Centos forks from RedHat), Fedora does the bleeding edge experimentation for RedHat so that RedHat can be seen as stable, Mageia is a mainly desktop distro and borrows a bit from Fedora but also has things Fedora won't have. PCLinux was a Mandrake fork, I've tried it, but find I like Mageia better.
On the Debian side, stability is still main focus, Ubuntu tries to bring updates sooner to Debian, and is sort of like Ubuntu is to Debian like Fedora is to RedHat. Other distros try to fork from Debian or Ubuntu (example Mint).
For package comparisons, you can look at distrowatch to see who's got latest/greatest.
As a fontforge contributor, I tend to see it like this.
Develop patches and testing on Mageia, but target successful install on Fedora (which gets forked to Mageia, RedHat, Centos, SuSE,...), and target successful install on Debian (which gets forked to Ubuntu, Mint, and other debian based forks).
Debian successful install was the most stubborn and hardest to finally get resolved, later than Fedora, but once done, it gets accepted into other distros easier. For example, look at how many distros here list debian or fedora as their main contacts.
https://repology.org/metapackage/libuni ... t/versionsAs a developer...this is an interesting note... there were a lot of issues and problems asked about problems installing fontforge on distro X Y or Z where I looked at the question and was "huh? I thought this sort of problem was figured out long ago. Why are they stuck on this? ...oh yeah, needs catching-up". The thing is, there's a lot of nice things running fine in Mageia I've already taken for granted as working, but some distros are still falling-over and having trouble with.
For your question about installing programs, first choice is mageia, and mageia tainted.
If you're going to mix and match programs from non-mageia repositories, the advice I could say is - build from source-code, do not import binaries from non-mageia repositories.