After coming close to abandoning linux because of the poor shape of the debian based distros, which I usually used, I decided to try out Mageia and have fallen in love with it. The reason being is while hardware is automatically setup, Mageia provides utilities allowing for tweaking and even for alternative drivers to be chosen from a list. With that said, I had one small problem and that was with audio. My laptop is specifically an HP Pavilion DV7-3165dx* using the intel_hda drivers.
Now, after I had created an /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file and added "options snd-hda-intel model=hp dv5 enable_msi=1" like I always had to under Linux to fix the problem of sound coming out of both the headphone port AND the speakers at the same time, sound would only come out of the headphone port.
After some research, it became apparent that this was a problem with the kernel version used. So my solution is simple for fixing this. The solution is to upgrade the kernel. ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/mageia/distrib ... x86_64.rpm will give you the Linux Kernel 3.5.1, which fixed the problem and so far seems to be running quite stable. I did read some problems with people who are using the proprietary drivers, but I'm sure this issue could be worked around.
If I notice any problems with the kernel or stability, I'll post it on here, but until the older kernel gets patched or something, this seems like the easiest solution.