Mageia 6.1 - grandchild of Mandrake

[Jason]

So I gave it a try. I chose Plasma though Gnome is an option in the install. And the Plasma install also comes with IceWM as another desktop environment with it (you choose on login each time). There's a third option that just says Custom - I think it's Xfce but maybe other choices are given?

Took forever to install and by forever, I mean about an 70 minutes or so. Granted I was watching a show on netflix at the same time so maybe that slowed down disk writes. And the ISO is 3.6 GB so it is installing more than many distros. However, with many distros installing in 20 minutes or less this was a long install process.

It looks really good, very clean professional looking desktop. All the software Plasma programs you'd expect and they chose VLC Player as the default media player. It also has a full-fledged configuration set of tools like YaST. Similar tools are in PCLinuxOS but to a lesser extent. Mageia and PCLinuxOS both have roots in Mandriva so this makes sense.

When it was finally installed, I ran the update tool (instead of doing it in the install which was offered as an option) and there were maybe five or six updates. I was struck with joy only to be disappointed a few minutes later as once those updates were installed and it refreshed there were 922 more updates! I kid you not. The live version is more recent (6.1) but you have to choose a desktop. Still, I probably should have gone with this.

I think I'll probably wait for 7, which is in beta now, to go to final release and give a fuller review then so I can avoid installing almost a thousand updates.


Update: Okay, just discovered that it's the live DVD versions (that you can install to USB, of course) that is version 6.1. However, you can install from the live version. The other difference is that the regular version has Plasma5, Gnome and I think Xfce desktops in the installer (you choose what you want during the install) while the live version is smaller but you have to choose the appropriate live ISO for the desktop environment you want ahead of time.

[buster]

I think I did an install from the live plasma. It was similar in time to the others distros. (But I didn't have other things running). And while I think there were many updates, many were tiny, like less than a kilobyte. And with fib it goes quickly. And the open-vm-tool software is in the repository.

Looking forward to hear about your reactions to it.

[Jason]

Your version was 6.1 while mine was 6 so you'd have a lot less updates as 6.1 came out in November.

[fox]

Mageia 7.2 beta 2 was just released; notes here.

[Jason]

Thanks, fox!

[buster]

Found this old review of Mageia - Distrowatch. Jesse seems to sum it up pretty accurately.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20170918#mageia