[Comment] Mageia Cauldron is Excellent

[coaxguy99]

No support request this time. I just wanted to congratulate the Mageia team for the excellent work you do. I am rocking on Cauldron with the Cinnamon Desktop (X11) and loving it. I have gradually been replacing my eight laptops with Mageia Cauldron because after using it for the past couple of months, I have found I prefer Mageia Cauldron over Mint, Fedora, Manjaro, and OpenSUSE. My only wish is that Mageia would have the printer automatically detected and configured the way it is with new installs of the distros I mentioned above. As far as I'm concerned, Cauldron should be a top 10 distro on Distrowatch. I know it used to be and I tried to switch over at Mageia 2 but I wasn't a fan of legacy grub and I didn't try again until Mageia 9 beta when I became a fan. I think a top priority should be finding a volunteer who is a global marketing expert to get Mageia the kind of attention MX Linux (personally not a fan) has.

Alben

[Germ]

You know Cauldron is the development release?

It can and will break. Not often, but it does happen...

[coaxguy99]

You know Cauldron is the development release?

It can and will break. Not often, but it does happen...

I know and that's okay. If it breaks, I'll just reinstall.

[Germ]

OK, sounds good. My main machine is running Cauldron.

[coaxguy99]

OK, sounds good. My main machine is running Cauldron.

My big wish is Mageia would become a rolling release with periodic live install .iso updates. Maybe have a test repo and hold back for a few days to fix any major problems, and then move to main. Cauldron is already so close to being just that.

[Germ]

Yes, that would be nice and has been discussed. But wasn't well received. For one reason not enough of a test base.

Mageia is a relatively small distro. Which is surprising when you consider how good it is.

[isadora]

So true, but I remember when Mandriva was one of the largest. I used it then and it was very good, but Mageia is now even better. I wish the rolling release idea was better received. There is no way it could break more than Arch and the distros that use Arch's repositories. I used Antergos and later, Reborn, for three or four years and I had to read forums and fix things at least every other month, as did practically everyone else (because of things in the Arch repo, not the downstream). My issue with Mageia 9 is that things such as the desktop environments can be several revisions older than what's in Cauldron and may not even be updated until the next major release. I feel like that is too long. I expect if Mageia did go to a rolling release, interest would increase and the testers would come.

[morgano]

One idea I have mentioned earlier for people who use Cauldron as rolling release:
When things break, you may want to roll back package versions, but the repos do not hold old package versions.
You want to use a local repo that keeps all packages of every version you ever install. Preferably without downloading what you do not use.

We already have that solution
Set up urpmi-proxy on one system, and when installing Cauldron, use netinstaller and set it to use that urpmi-proxy as repo.
When installed set system to use repos on that urpmi-proxy.
Buy default urpmi-proxy keep all versions of any packages it ever buffred.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Urpmi-proxy
There is also a script to rinse old versions.

Before I had high bandwidth internet, urpmi-proxy saved me much download time and size when several local machines used same proxied data.

[microchip]

There are enough (excellent) rolling distros around. No need to make Mageia one as well. I do not approve

[benmc]

OK, sounds good. My main machine is running Cauldron.

My big wish is Mageia would become a rolling release with periodic live install .iso updates. Maybe have a test repo and hold back for a few days to fix any major problems, and then move to main. Cauldron is already so close to being just that.

At this point I would suggest that, quite literally, roll your own.
Having just written that, I had, just this week, tried to roll my own, using draklive2 to create a "Live".iso.
see => https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Draklive & https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Draklive2

obviously doing something wrong, because it failed to create the "Live".iso

[Germ]

Yea, I tried that a few years back. Didn't work for me either...

[Germ]

It would really be great if MX Snapshot could be ported to Mageia.

https://github.com/MX-Linux/mx-snapshot

Program used for creating functional ISO images from the running system. You can later on install/burn the ISO image on a USB flashdrive or a DVD (depending on the size of the image). Use MX Live USB Maker (GUI) or live-usb-maker (CLI tool) to burn the resulting image.

Edit: Wonder if you could get it to install and run with alien? I've never used alien.

[morgano]

I would think MX snapshot have lots of incompatibilities. And alien is broken, IIRC.

HM... Our Live can boot and install a copy of running self (incl updates, settings etc) to a disk. Probably something to build on!

[coaxguy99]

Here it is, June 12 of 2025, and I am still of the opinion that Mageia Cauldron is the best 'unofficial' rolling release in Linux Land. I know it is NOT RECOMMENDED to use it this way but it's just soooo good!!!

[Germ]

Yep. Been running it a while.

[laidlaws]

I just tried to install Cauldron from the non free netinstall iso.
I got a message "You need to install the kernel first."
Is that why it is no longer called Netinstall?

[doktor5000]

You may want to create a separate thread for your issue in the cauldron subforum. Also the ISO is still called netinstall.

[coaxguy99]

I could be wrong but I believe you can't directly install Cauldron. First you have to install the latest stable release and then follow the instructions for "upgrading" to Cauldron. That's what I did. Others here may know better but I believe that is what I read when I researched it.

[Germ]

You can use the netinstall to install cauldron on it's own or you can upgrade a running release to cauldron by changing the repos you use to cauldron. Although, the upgrade from plasma5 to plasma6 requires a lot of work.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Cauldron