Remember the old times? It was about five, maybe six years ago. When every other distribution would fail, you could put your Mandriva CD into the slot and it would work out of the box.
Fast forward, it's early 2015, Mageia 4 is out and stable, and I have two computers: A self-built desktop computer with two Radeon graphics cards from 2013 with Crossfire and a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga. Both of them work out of the box with Fedora and OpenSUSE, but I wanted to try out, and maybe switch back to, good old Mandriva/Mageia.
First, I tried Mageia 4.
Desktop: Yay, the setup starts, and everything seems to work, it even ships directly with an FGLRX-driver. I of course select the option to use the proprietary driver. First bummer: I can't establish a wifi-connection, even though the correct driver is available (it's an ath9k chip), and I can enter both the network name and the WPA2-key. It just fails without clear error message besides of "something went wrong". I finish configuration and reboot.
It fails to boot.
It gets stuck somewhere and displays the message that it has been "shut down". Yeah, great. Not even an emergency console.
Thinkpad Yoga: The installer fails to start the X server, and thus an installation is not possible.
Well, fair enough - maybe the drivers on the by now one year old Mageia aren't new enough. Let's try Mageia 5 Beta 3. Yes, I realize it's a beta and it's considered unstable, but what I experienced reminded me of an early alpha.
Thinkpad Yoga: The installer starts - in full HD! But neither the trackpad, nor trackpoint, nor keyboard work. I have to plug in an USB-mouse and an USB-keyboard. The installer completely ignores the region settings and leaves me with the default en_US keyboard setting. Fair enough - I know the layout good enough by now. The installation works, except that it's completely impossible to even start setting up a wifi connection. I create a user and set the user and root passwords, reboot and remove the USB stick.
Without any explanation at all, I'm put into emergency mode. After a few tries I figure it might be because the USB stick isn't plugged in. And - it boots with the installer USB-stick plugged in! I'm on the KDM screen, even the built-in keyboard works now. But Mageia doesn't accept my password at all, neither in KDM nor on the console, both still being en_US. Disappointed, I cancel the attempt to switch the Thinkpad over to Mageia.
Desktop: The installer starts. Even the locale settings work. The installation is annoyingly slow, taking over one hour, hinting that there are USB problems or something related. A wifi connection during the configuration phase still is impossible. After the reboot, the emergency mode is inevitable - as suspected, Mageia has problems with USB.
Goodbye, Mageia. I'll miss you.