Hello guys, Racer is here!
A little background about me: Former distro hopper and mostly Mint/Debian user. I had never tried RPM based distros before. My experience with Debian based distros is rich but still my skill level is novice so you can expect questions from me.
Nowadays: Yesterday I had installed Mageia 3 on my 7 year old PC (I was afraid that this will crawl under Mageia...how wrong I was). Installing unsupported version wasn't funny experience - 455+ updates and then dependency hell. Nice end to my hard day! Anyway the update to Mageia 4 went very smooth for my surprise and now I'm a happy Mageia 4 user.
What I hate about the whole process: BLOAT, bloat, bloat! I installed only KDE 4 (choosing "Other" option) and still KDE was bloated with unwanted programs. For my surprise (again) casual programs like "KSnapshot" were missing but some others which I will never use were there... Also the install process feels like a beta test. Really where are the options to set a computer name, why I have so bad collection for user avatars, why some ordinary options are hidden (for example full list of countries)?
What I love about Mageia: Beauty and the freedom to choose. I was never a fan of KDE (and still KDE is bloated for me) but man, what things you can do with it... I'm just in love with my system! And I will never switch again to another distro mainly because Mageia is a rolling release and keeps improving. When Mageia 5 is out - I will install it on my laptop too and I'm sure - it will be even better.
PS: Please do not take my bad words too serious, I just point out where Mageia is failling in my eyes. In any case I don't want to blame someone - I want improved Mageia after all.