Mageia forum

"Mageia is a relatively new open source distribution which was started in 2010 and is based on a commercial Linux distribution called Mandriva. Mandriva was liquidated by a French court in 2010 and all of their programmers were fired. Some of these programmers formed a new company called Mageia to carry on with the Mandriva distribution. But Mageia is not as well organized or as simple to use as the Linux Mint distributions - which is why we recommend Linux Mint".

Quoted from here:

http://www.freeyourselffrommicrosoftandthensa.org/04-open-source-to-the-rescue/4-1-a-brief-history-of-linux-operating-systems

And then they say:

"Mint XFCE is not very good because its file manager is pretty limited. However, Mint KDE is very interesting in that it is very similar to Mint Mate. To make matters more confusing, each of the four options above is available in a x32 bit version for computers with less than 4 GB of RAM and a x64 bit version for computers with 4 GB or more RAM. If this sounds as confusing as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that is because it is.".

Hmmm, confused yet?

That writer would probably be even more confused if he knew that 8 flavours for one distro version is not that much, and probably applies to the majority of the hundreds of linux distros.

Good one Dok. He says Mageia isn't as simple but goes on for pages explaining how complicated and confusing Mint is. I don't know
much about Mint and was even more confused after reading it, but I did get the idea and learn a little about the Gnome ordeal.
Being a KDE guy I haven't kept up with what all the hype was over Gnome and the changes etc.

I don't think he is the one to be convincing people to use Mint. As much as I know about Linux in general I was confused,
so I can image a Windows guy trying to make sense of it. With Windows you choose Home, Ultimate etc, easy to understand,
and some don't know 32 from 64 bit etc. A Windows guy would be lucky to get what he wanted installed if he didn't quit reading
and give up. I know I've read about Mint in simpler terms that pretty much said this one is more like Windows etc.

Hello

I have Mint15 running in a VM. Just to compare against other oses - Debian to Winxp is in there, so I am open to all offers.
I have used Mandrake / Mandriva / Mageia since 2002 and, to be blunt, the evolution of the MCC has made the heavy lifting stuff so simple to do, typically 2 mouse clicks after entering your password and you are where you need to be.
In Mint, to update have to use the update manager- self contained module, that's all it does. If there are any [ and I mean any ] issues with the update it just locks it up. If you are lucky you can restart the manager but usually have to restart the VM.
To install new software or remove you have to use Synaptic package manager, an art unto itself.
To configure hardware, you need go to something else.
The list goes on.
If you move from Windows [ 98-7 ] to Linux and you are a user that uses the Windows control centre a lot, the MCC is a walk in the park.
This of course is my own opinion.

Same thing I say, the power of MCC doesn't exist in any distro I've seen. A friend ask me about Mint and I told him though I hadn't installed it (in a VM), I did't think it had anything like MCC. I had told him I downloaded it to play with. My neighbor lady ask me to build her a computer and put Mageia on it. I've been telling her about Linux sine way back. From Mandrake on up to Mageia, for years.

Lately I'd been telling her how good it is getting and just about anyone could use it, not like the old days of driver problems and newer stuff not working. Wouldn't ya know it, she has a Kodak camera I can't get working, Dok is trying to help me out. Anyway, when I installed Mageia I showed her System Settings and told her that is mostly for KDE and how it looks and acts, like mouse settings etc.

I told her it had sort of like two control panels (like Windows control panel). Then I told her MCC is where the system tools are, tools that can break your system like deleting a partition etc. I showed her installing and uninstalling, hardware tools and info and told her to look around but exit without applying and she would be ok.

She's pretty much got it. She said she wouldn't be fooling around with it much as long as it worked but she'd like to poke around adding software etc. I told her to google what she wants to do. like to google music player or spread sheet program for Linux etc. I did show her LibreOffice and music/video players but she got the idea. Her biggest problem is just not knowing the names of the programs to do what she wants, but she is doing great.

At the end I told her other distros don't have MCC but all KDE's have System Settings. She thought it was pretty cool and I told her all the way back to Mandriva the reviewers loved MCC. To this day I don't know why no one has tried to duplicate it. I know you can make a folder with shortcuts to all of the tools, or an icon containment or something on any system.

Still no one tries to consolidate the tools to be within easy reach like when you first install a system and want to configure the fonts, mouse, colors etc. I know those are in system settings but generally on a fresh install you want to do all of that, check things out, install software (or remove) and a lot of things. When I first install I start hating the password and use 12 to make it simple because I am constantly changing things.

I love Mageia and don't know what I'd do without it. When I seen Mandriva 2011 with ROSA stuff I about had a heart attack. I could remove/hide stuff, but what a relief to find Mageia, more like the old mandrake than Mandriva. I'm sure people love their distros as much as I do, it's a Linux user trait, but I'd sure hate to have to learn to love another.

OpenSUSE's yast control panel is more comprehensive and capable than MCC. This, of course, makes it more difficult to use because more options are available. But those options all ARE available, and yast does the simple stuff in a perfectly simple way.

I still do pretty much all of my network setup work in Mageia by directly modifying the scripts. This is because MCC doesn't give me the fine control I need. In OpenSUSE, I use yast generally for all network setup - in fact, for pretty much all setup - except in cases where I have made modifications to the kernel and the networking stack.

Now my requirements are far more demanding than those of the normal desktop user so my experience won't necessarily translate well to others' experiences. But the point is that while MCC is definitely one of the best GUI config tools, it is not THE best one. In fact, an associate of mine who is an OpenSUSE aficionado rather harshly criticized MCC for its lack of features. Of course, he is a bigot...

yankee495 wrote:At the end I told her other distros don't have MCC but all KDE's have System Settings. She thought it was pretty cool and I told her all the way back to Mandriva the reviewers loved MCC. To this day I don't know why no one has tried to duplicate it. I know you can make a folder with shortcuts to all of the tools, or an icon containment or something on any system.

To be fair, Suse's YaST is much more comprehensive, they had it long before Mandrake put this together, and it's better-maintained.

Thanks Dok, I think I read that some time back. I know Suse has been around a long time, may have to check it out.
I don't think I'll be changing from Mageia though not as long as they make it.

yea since after using ubuntu/fedora for 10 years now, i dicovered the beuty of Mageia and MCC, i just dont get how other distros dont have it..
also the the mendioned multiple dvd versions etc, sure thing Mageia/Susa are very interesting, but somehow people dont discover it as fast as Ubuntu/Mint.