Mageia 6.1 - grandchild of Mandrake

[buster]

Mandrake was the gold standard of easy and complete until subsumed into Mandriva, and then it seemed to lose its luster. Many of us look back nostalgically to using it, 'back in the old days' so to speak.

Many times I've tried to work with Mageia, unsuccessfully, and in moments of frustration I've trashed it on these forums. Since then I've found the fault lay not with Mageia, but with yours truly. It's not difficult or incomplete, but 'different'. Things are not in the same place as expected, but the layout is perfectly logical to anyone who uses it. And the terminals are rusting from lack of use - everything is point and click.

I've used the usual VMWare, 2 gig ram, 2 cores, 50 gig hd.

The install is straight forward and attractively packaged. Simple really. Plasma is comfortable. 'open-vm-tools-desktop' is in the repositories, but hard to find because the default search is not set to 'all'.

But there are some outstanding features that deserve mentioning:

Magia Control Center, sitting on the bottom panel, is awesome. Everything is here in simple straightforward graphics. And beside it is the System Settings. Correcting, changing is immediately available.

Music and movies play automatically. (Usb sticks are noticed, but do not open automatically the way they do in Mint virtual.) Drag/drop, full screen work.

A carefully crafted and attractive system that maybe is worth trying.

[fox]

....
Many times I've tried to work with Mageia, unsuccessfully, and in moments of frustration I've trashed it on these forums. Since then I've found the fault lay not with Mageia, but with yours truly.
....

So what made you try it again, and what were you doing wrong before?

[buster]

If an install requires attention or patience, I tend to do poorly.     And I often drink beer while I play with Linux, which may have had some effect. The initial problem is that it just felt different. Though it actually isn't.The final problem was the install of open-vm-tools-desktop, which didn't show in the repositories. Partly their fault, because the default setting wasn't 'all' packages.

So I asked on the forum why it wasn't in the repositories, and got an indication it was in the repos from doktor5000, and another lovely response from Isador in Amsterdam, who has used Mandrake and children since 1961! Once I knew it was there, I figured out what to change to get it.

My fundamental belief about Linux gets in the way sometimes too. I think Linux can and should be relatively simple and straightforward - this is the only way it's going to get popular.

[Jason]

Mandrake in its time really led the way to user-friendly Linux distributions. It was the first to package a major distro (Red Hat) with a friendly desktop environment (KDE) and a delightful graphical installer with a graphical partition manager, all things we take for granted in Linux distros now.

You could do it yourself but it was rather complicated as package managers back then didn't automatically grab the correct dependencies or install things in the right order. Internet speeds were also a lot slower, so having Linux CDs was really necessary unless you planned to spend a couple of days (or more) to download ISOs. And downloading KDE packages could take what seemed like forever.

Mandrake (or Linux Mandrake as it was known back then) could be purchased in a box for about $30 in local stores or directly from the company and it came with several CDs, an excellent thick manual and the StarOffice office suite (the ancestor of OpenOffice and LibreOffice). It was very cool in its day.

[Jason]

... who has used Mandrake and children since 1961!

Typo I presume? Mandrake's first release was in 1998. Wow. 20 years!

[buster]

Ah well. When you go too quickly and you're old. I had two things in mind and they got kind of twisted. Isadora is 61 years old, and has used Mandrake etc since 2001.

Username:
    isadora
Location:
    Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Age:
    61
Occupation:
    Sys-admin at IBM-i-Series
Interests:
    Mandrake/Mandriva-user ever since 2001. Never really changed. Tried many other distros though. But since all changed, and surely after September 18th 2010, a hopeful follower of Mageia. Global moderator at Mageia since May 7th, 2011

[fox]

I didn't get into Linux when Mandrake was around, but I remember Mandriva. It had a strong reputation for being user friendly, and also for having a good settings tool. I'm sure I tried it at least once myself, but I can't remember why I eschewed it in favour of Ubuntu. It may have had to do with the default desktop; I have never stuck with a KDE distro because I don't like the apps that go with it. But like openSUSE, Mandriva also had a Gnome version. Being user friendly and company-supported, it could have had the success that Ubuntu did. I'm not sure why it didn't.

[buster]

" I have never stuck with a KDE distro because I don't like the apps that go with it"

Apparently, from something I read lately, most people do keep the default setup after an install, like forever. That is the most common aftermath of an install.

I like the familiar - Firefox, Thunderbird, qBittorrent, Clementine, VLC, Kpat, LibreOffice. So I get them immediately in every distro if they are missing. (Just a note-Why send out Transmission with most distro discs?) Often I try the default software just out of curiosity, and am happy with RhythmBox. Ktorrent works well in Konqueror. Pretty well any terminal will do. Prefer a split screen set up availability in the file manager, as in Dolphin. Then I choose some agreeable wallpaper, and sometimes change theme and icons - but this often happens a day or two later..

Generally, the time I take to do a completely new install as a vm is anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes. But note I don't watch as the computer does things - I go away and do something else. But say 20 minutes of 'my' time, and I'd guess that's about average for most of us.

[Jason]

When it was Mandrake and for a short time later as Mandriva it had a lot of success. It pre-dated Ubuntu by many years. I just think the advantages it had, a user-friendly desktop, installer and configuration tools ended up becoming something that most distros ended up having so there was no longer any specific reason to use Mandriva anymore. Gnome didn't even exist in early iterations of Mandrake.

With regards to KDE (it's actually Plasma, there is no longer a desktop called KDE, that's the company), I use it on a daily basis and even I don't use most of the apps that come with it. I agree it's a bit of a pain if you have to remove a lot of apps that you won't use.I just like the desktop-specific stuff like Dolphin and how configurable it is. You have a lot more control than with Gnome or any other DE for that matter.

But that's now, give it a few months and I'll probably get bored with Kubuntu and move onto something else. I always do eventually

[buster]

"I agree it's a bit of a pain if you have to remove a lot of apps that you won't use."

You mentioned before that you do this. In some distros you can do a right click on the program in the menu and 'uninstall' is an option. Mint allows this for example. That's awfully quick. But generally if it just sits unopened as unused software on the hd, it doesn't use resources as far as I know. That's what I tend to do.

Or as you get the programs you want, at the same time you can mark the ones you don't want for removal. Kill two mice with one stick so to speak.

[ssfc72]

So if KDE is now called Plasma, maybe Kubuntu should be retitled to Pubuntu. :-)

When it was Mandrake and for a short time later as Mandriva it had a lot of success. It pre-dated Ubuntu by many years. I just think the advantages it had, a user-friendly desktop, installer and configuration tools ended up becoming something that most distros ended up having so there was no longer any specific reason to use Mandriva anymore. Gnome didn't even exist in early iterations of Mandrake.

With regards to KDE (it's actually Plasma, there is no longer a desktop called KDE, that's the company), I use it on a daily basis and even I don't use most of the apps that come with it. I agree it's a bit of a pain if you have to remove a lot of apps that you won't use.I just like the desktop-specific stuff like Dolphin and how configurable it is. You have a lot more control than with Gnome or any other DE for that matter.


But that's now, give it a few months and I'll probably get bored with Kubuntu and move onto something else. I always do eventually

[Jason]

You mentioned before that you do this. In some distros you can do a right click on the program in the menu and 'uninstall' is an option. Mint allows this for example.

I never noticed that option before. Must be a Cinnamon thing, I presume. Haven't seen it in other distros. It's definitely not a Plasma thing although I do notice the option to 'hide' an application.

[Jason]

So if KDE is now called Plasma, maybe Kubuntu should be retitled to Pubuntu. :-)

Haha, good point!

[buster]

"So if KDE is now called Plasma, maybe Kubuntu should be retitled to Pubuntu. :-)"

You forgot to mention Ponqueror, Pate, Pmail, Ponsole, Paffeine, Pwrite, Pplayer, P3B, Pmix and who knows how many others.

[Jason]

Mmmm, Pmail!