Mageia forum

First if this is not the correct place for this please forgive me. I am a semi long term Linux Mint user, and have played around with some other distros such as POP!_OS. I have three System 76 laptops, all with Coreboot, and for some reason I have never been able to get either Mageia or Fedora to run on them without errors. I have just purchased an HP Dev One laptop that I changed from POP!_OS to Mint. I have just retired, and so I am going to purchase another HP laptop probably tomorrow, and have the ram updated to either 16 or 32 gb, it will be an HP Pavillion 14" since I seem to favor that size laptop. I will never use Windows 11 again, so before I even boot it, I will insert the Mageia 8 USB, and load that. Just for your information, my first Linux distribution was Mandrake 7.0/7.1 back in the day. After the hatred and scorn that was thrown my way for using a "kiddie distro" and asking questions the offended the elite, I left Linux for 15+ years in anger. I am working on getting back into Linux again, so I have some questions since I am more familiar with the Debian based distributions and their command syntax. So here are my questions (and forgive me if they have been beaten to death), mostly because I find conflicting information on YouTube. I understand some of these questions are probably in the wiki, but I am very tired today and my google fu is weak today so please bear with me.

1) Is Sudo enabled by default? If so do I have to manually add me as a user to, I guess, the wheel group in order to use sudo? If sudo is not installed, would the command be (after I go to root), dnf install sudo?

2) Most HP laptops use REALTEK wifi cards, is there support for these cards out of the box? If not where do I go to get the driver?

3) So far kernel 5.10 seems to work well with most hardware, is there any way to update kernels in Mageia 8? In my Linux Mint installations I use: sudo apt-get install linux-oem-20.04d which gives me the 5.14 kernel. It has also recently added the 5.15 kernel which works well.

4) Installing more updated software such as LibreOffice 7.3.3 and Thunderbird 102. In Mint I do; "sudo dpkg -i *.deb" to update the office software to the latest version. I am one of those people who want the latest and most up to date office suites.

5) I am also one of those who automatically installs TLP, HTOP, VLC, and some others. My Google mail account locks out every other email client except Thunderbird for some reason, and I cannot get it to allow Geary for instance. Thunderbird seems to be the only Linux email client which is allowed to work. So the command to install those items would be "sudo dnf install tlp htop vlc?

6) I understand that Mageia 9 is soon to arrive, and I am excited about that.

Thanks to all, and I appreciate you putting up with my silly questions.

1) Is Sudo enabled by default? If so do I have to manually add me as a user to, I guess, the wheel group in order to use sudo? If sudo is not installed, would the command be (after I go to root), dnf install sudo?
You already asked this september last year: https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14319
You have to install and enable it according https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Configuring_sudo. You can either use "urpmi sudo" or "dnf install sudo".
Informations about urpmi: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/URPMI
Informations about dnf: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Using_DNF

2) Most HP laptops use REALTEK wifi cards, is there support for these cards out of the box? If not where do I go to get the driver?
Without knowing the exact chipset it may be hard to tell. But realtek is a known manufacturer and the support out of the box is good.

3) So far kernel 5.10 seems to work well with most hardware, is there any way to update kernels in Mageia 8? In my
If you install Mageia and enable the online media whilst installation (for updates) you will get kernel 5.15.50 atm. Higher kernel versions are also available, but they are only for experienced users as they are backports
For setup of online media whilst installation: https://doc.mageia.org/installer/8/en/content/software.html
Installation media for beginners: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Install_media_in_Mageia_for_beginners

5) I am also one of those who automatically installs TLP, HTOP, VLC, and some others. My Google mail account locks out every other email client except Thunderbird for some reason, and I cannot get it to allow Geary for instance. Thunderbird seems to be the only Linux email client which is allowed to work. So the command to install those items would be "sudo dnf install tlp htop vlc?
Or "urpmi tlp htop vlc"
Ways to install software: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Ways_to_install_programs
The reason why you can't use Google mail account with other clients is that you missed to setup the mandatory two factor or Oauth authentication method in your Gmail account.This is required since some time...

You should also have a look at our wiki yourself:
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Documentation
and the official docs:
https://www.mageia.org/en-gb/doc/

Thank you so very much! Hopefully either tomorrow or Wednesday I will have a fully functioning Mageia laptop. I am stoked to get the heir of Mandrake back up and running! The 5.15 Kernel is pretty good so far. Also I will check on the Google issue, I had not known that! Thank you! Your help is gratefully appreciated. I can see that I am going to have to live in the Wiki for a while, that is not a bad thing.

In my experience, sudo is usually installed per default.
Yes add yourself to wheel group, and it should work (after logout/in)

Etiquette: No need to quote that much, or in this case you needed not quote anything . (keep reading effort low)

Welcome to Mageia

2 factor authentication is not required, at least not in the US. They want you to set it up.

I use gmail on my phone with the Samsung email client with no problems. I've never setup 2 factor.

Germ wrote:2 factor authentication is not required, at least not in the US. They want you to set it up.
I use gmail on my phone with the Samsung email client with no problems. I've never setup 2 factor.

Oauth is required (which is enabled in Samsungs email client): https://support.google.com/a/answer/9003945?hl=en. This article is not marked with a date. As far as i remember there was a note sometime ago that Google will disable the access to their email services for clients which doesn't fulfill the Oauth requirement. Kmail, Thunderbird, Samsung and many other clients already fulfill this requirements...

OK, thanks for the clarification.

Both kmail and evolution work with gmail, including oauth logins.

For myself, I consider kmail to be obscenely buggy and unreliable, and evolution works well enough. So, thunderbird is not your only choice for gmail.

Thanks all. Thunderbird works well enough for my purposes.

Please don't forget to mark the thread as solved, by editing the subject of the first post and prefix it with [SOLVED], thanks in advance.