Mageia 7 review on Distrowatch

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Mageia 7 review on Distrowatch

Postby ITA84 » Jul 8th, '19, 10:13

This week Distrowatch has reviewed Mageia 7 (KDE Plasma Live installation): https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issu ... 708#mageia

I have to say, after excluding Mageia from the main Linux distros, it was nice to read this generally positive review. I did however see that among the (very few) issues encountered there are a couple I wanted to disuss:
  • the reviewer mentions failing to install Steam and only succeeding with Flatpak; there are no details about what's wrong, but given another post on the forum, it could be because 32-bit repositories aren't enabled by default, and the package manager can't find the 32-bit libraries required by Steam. I've only found the thing about the 32-bit repos now because I've been on Cauldron since Mageia 2, and only now switched to an official release: reconfiguring the package sources I saw that 32-bit repos were left disabled. I understand that 32-bit is slowly going away, and would love to get rid of all the duplicate packages eventually, but it seems rather unintuitive to me that some 64-bit packages (Steam, Wine) can't be installed because of that and (apparently) the error message isn't informative enough for an average user to figure out what to do to make them work. I was then wondering if there could be a way, with URPM, DNF, or rpmdr*, to detect cross-repo dependencies where the other repo is available but disabled
  • the reviewer said rpmdr* couldn't find any updates after installation, but DNF could; I myself couldn't find any updates since the switch from Cauldron to Official, neither with rpmdrake nor with URPM, but thought there weren't any updates available yet (on pkgbuild I only saw mga7 updates in testing). Just wanted to know if I'm missing something
ITA84
 
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Re: Mageia 7 review on Distrowatch

Postby andresilm » Jul 13th, '19, 15:31

ITA84 wrote:This week Distrowatch has reviewed Mageia 7 (KDE Plasma Live installation): https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issu ... 708#mageia

I have to say, after excluding Mageia from the main Linux distros, it was nice to read this generally positive review. I did however see that among the (very few) issues encountered there are a couple I wanted to disuss:
  • the reviewer mentions failing to install Steam and only succeeding with Flatpak; there are no details about what's wrong, but given another post on the forum, it could be because 32-bit repositories aren't enabled by default, and the package manager can't find the 32-bit libraries required by Steam. I've only found the thing about the 32-bit repos now because I've been on Cauldron since Mageia 2, and only now switched to an official release: reconfiguring the package sources I saw that 32-bit repos were left disabled. I understand that 32-bit is slowly going away, and would love to get rid of all the duplicate packages eventually, but it seems rather unintuitive to me that some 64-bit packages (Steam, Wine) can't be installed because of that and (apparently) the error message isn't informative enough for an average user to figure out what to do to make them work. I was then wondering if there could be a way, with URPM, DNF, or rpmdr*, to detect cross-repo dependencies where the other repo is available but disabled


Hi everyone. I've installed Mageia 7 few days ago and I am very excited to test a Mandriva distribution again on my PC after more than 10 years. I hope I can make it my main OS in a few days if everything goes well.
I would like to contribute in some way so let me take the audacity to give my personal vision of this topic.
I faced the same issue when tried to install steam. One of the many things I try to install in every distro I'm trying on my PC (not vbox, btw) is steam. It may sound not important but as it is officially supporting Linux, and even more they are deploying it with some kind of wine inside (right now I'm installing Aoe2 from steam in Mageia), people will try to see if they can play the games they bought in that platform. Not being able to do that could cause to discard this OS as a serious alternative to Ubuntu, imo.

The error message gives no information for the user, and might be a frustrating experience for new linux adopter. I was used to errors related to unsatisfied dependencies when I was using Mandriva 2006, but (at least in Ubuntu) is not common today.
Maybe you decided to not include the repository with the needed libraries for steam for good reasons. But for consistency, I think it would be good then to exclude the steam package from the main ones, and maybe in a section of the welcome screen tell to the user that steam is available as an officially supported package (that would be nice) and explain how to add the repository where it is located.

Btw, I'm really enjoying Mageia, so many thanks to the community for keeping alive the Mandriva spirit.

Regards.
andresilm
 
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Re: Mageia 7 review on Distrowatch

Postby benmc » Jul 15th, '19, 22:00

ITA84 wrote:[*]the reviewer said rpmdr* couldn't find any updates after installation, but DNF could; I myself couldn't find any updates since the switch from Cauldron to Official, neither with rpmdrake nor with URPM, but thought there weren't any updates available yet (on pkgbuild I only saw mga7 updates in testing). Just wanted to know if I'm missing something[/list]


Hmm.
I, too, have had this issue.
it appears to not be the new installation, but rather the mirror that you (or $MIRRORLIST) select.
My localest mirrors (x2 in Australia) both report no updates available.
If I choose Princeton, US, then updates are available, (and then installed).

as a side note, I would generally utilize
Code: Select all
urpmi --auto-update
for updating
benmc
 
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Re: Mageia 7 review on Distrowatch

Postby ITA84 » Jul 16th, '19, 09:27

Thanks, benmc. I've actually had some package updates afterwards, but only once. I don't really mind at the moment, as I'm trying to keep a stable system for some tasks, and when I'm done I'll just jump back into Cauldron. But, yeah, there seem to be some issues here and there with mirrors: for example, ibiblio seems to have removed the Mageia 6 repo as soon as Mageia 7 was released
ITA84
 
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