I was looking for a distro to try for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest (https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com) and thought I’d revisit Mageia, currently in a Beta 2 of its next version. Mandrake was my first successful installation of a Linux distro, so I like to check up on how things are going. Mageia appears to be produced by the remnant of original French developers, so by all accounts should be the closest to pure Mandrake. Considering how much I like OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS, how bad could it be?
I found a home-grown installer which wasn’t bad but needed work to make it as accessible as Ubiquity (let alone Calamares, still the gold standard). I did get through it, which is more than I have been able to say about installers for Fedora or OpenSUSE.
After installation and rebooting, it wasn’t all that inviting, although it looked like they had put a lot of effort into trying to make it so. One of the first welcome screens asked if I wanted to use their default package management or dnfdragora? I tried to select dnfdragora, as it works so well in OM. But no, they do not include that in the package, or even in the repos — or they hide it to where their package manager search function can’t find it.
I have tried a few other things, but it is admittedly still early in my foray into this distro. Nothing seems to feel right yet, and I hope that improves soon.
This is a 2nd Beta of their 8th official version, you’d think they’d have ironed out issues like this. Am I expecting too much?
…mostly open source software (and hardware)
