Guest post by Members of the Mageia Linux community have been waiting for a few weeks now for a beta release of Mageia 5. Several delays have held back the Mageia 5 beta and the project’s developers have posted an update explaining why. It seems the problems started when Mageia updated its copy of the RPM package manager.
The new RPM version introduced changes that were significant enough to break a lot of core packages during the mass rebuild, and lots of packages failed to build in a chain reaction.
Problems continued when another software update, this time the GNU C library, caused the distribution’s system installer to stop functioning properly.
You may know that a Linux distribution release is basically an installer together with a set of packages. The latter were now starting to behave properly, but we were then faced with some issues in the installer regarding glibc (the GNU C library) and RPM. This delayed the beta for another week or so.
All show stopping bugs have been fixed and Mageiia has finally pushed out their beta release for people to test. The upcoming launch of Mageia 5 is expected to take place at the end of January.
I remember when I went after all alphas, betas and RCs of all Linux distributions. It was fun and I was quite a fan, but one day I realized that it was only a hobby, a pastime. Nowadays I use OS X 90% of the time and Windows perhaps 10% of the time. But then I use Android a lot, on phones and tablets.
About the same here: form Alphas/Betas/RCs/0Day to a Fedora which is out of support for about a year. Reasons? The lack of time for an upgrade and the lack of an incentive to upgrade.
I’m curious why people always have to tell which distro they use everywhere Mageia/Mandriva/Mandrake is mentioned. It’s a trend I’ve noticed since the last 10 years. At every news about Mageia there is a deluge of posts like “Hey guys, I use Arch!” or “Mageia? Yeah I used Mandrake back in the years, now I’m on DistroX”. Well for Arch I kind of understand, their distro have few users and they are passionate and they want people to know it exists and try it. But I’m pretty sure absolutely nobody use Mageia because they don’t know OS X or Windows. Why do you think people care that you are using OS X?
Edited 2014-11-13 08:45 UTC
My comment consisted of (barely) 3 lines, 2 sentences. Without the second sentence it wouldn’t have made much sense. That is why.
Edited 2014-11-13 10:14 UTC
Question: How do you know if someone runs Arch Linux?
Answer: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
Same thing here.
I started with Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, dual booting with Windows 95, after using quite a few home systems since the ZX Spectrum.
It was fun to tinker with GNU/Linux all those years, and I learned a lot about UNIX like environments. But I have other priorities nowadays.
Currently all my work laptops run Windows 7 (will be moving to 8.1 shortly) with GNU/Linux running on VMs.
The only device I have with GNU/Linux as main OS, is an Asus Netbook that I use when traveling.
I remember when I used Windows back in the day and got dev previews of Windows 95 and the New Shell for NT 3.51 (for those who weren’t around, New Shell was the Windows 95 interface on NT 3.51). Was kinda fun.
Now all I use Windows for is games.
Edited 2014-11-13 12:24 UTC
It confuses me at best. Why is it that in a given Linux distribution like Mageia, they are usually upgrading stuff from one version to another and presented it as a new feature for end users.
Why not just stabilize on an application stable version and then improve and add features to the desktop where it make sense? RPM versions do not matter to me(end user), unless if the developers really need the feature given for them to get their work done. I am not seeing any improvements from any Linux distribution, until Unity 8 will be released, all of these Linux distributions does not in any way offer something new that will revolutionized the Linux desktop.
Edited 2014-11-13 01:23 UTC
Well for starters Mageia, like Mandriva and Mandrake before it, are basically “RPM distro with KDE.” That’s their hat. KDE 5 is a major improvement over KDE 4 in pretty much every way, from performance to default icons. They’d be dumb to stick with the legacy branch.
i think you are missing the point.
if they have a problem with more recent rpm – they should stick to more stable version and roll with it for now.
nobody said anything about kde5 here.
Edited 2014-11-14 20:27 UTC
Back in the days when I tried every potential Windows-replacement Linux distro under the sun, Mandrake Linux was one of the best contenders. In the past few years even news of OpenSuse is mostly overshadowed by Ubuntu, and ever since the Mandrake/Connectiva merger to form “Mandriva” I had nearly ceased to remember that this distro still exists… a quick Google now reveals to me that Mageia is the current “go-to” community-oriented Mandrake descendent, having been formed from a number of ex-Mandriva employees after said company went through some financial difficulties. I’m now curious to try it out when the final version is released. And also curious, can anyone here report on their experience with this distro?
I didn’t try Mageia 5 beta but I can share my experience with Mageia 4.
Mageia is one of the top distros. It’s stable, consistent and fast. The MCC (control center) is most certainly the best of any distro. Their KDE top notch and their GNOME is the best I’ve seen. They added the missing stuff on gnome shell, like the task bar and the right clicks. I found that this is the only one that works out of the box. I’m very happy with this distro.
Here’s my comparison to other comparable (it would be useless to compare it to gentoo or puppy or red hat) distros:
Compared to Ubuntu: Mageia doesn’t try to spy. You don’t have to tweak the settings to tell it to stop spying since it’s community based. Mageia doesn’t have Unity. I have no use for it and I don’t understand the point of Unity but if you like it you won’t find it in Mageia. I found Mageia is more stable. Ubuntu’s tools are a bad joke when compared to Mageia’s MCC. Ubuntu has a far far bigger community. When I look for something on Google I usually type “hex editor ubuntu” because it yields more useful results than “hex editor mageia” of “hex editor linux” and then I query the repos to see if the software is packaged in Mageia.
Compared to Fedora: Mageia is less cutting edge. They use Firefox ESR for instance. Mageia is more stable and again the MCC is far better than Fedora’s “things”. Fedora community is a little bigger in English and German but Mageia probably has a bigger community in russian, french or spanish.
I would advise Mageia for desktop users when they know a thing or two about GNU because of its desktop focus and very good tools. For clueless users Ubuntu is probably better because of the community. For developers Fedora is probably better because they have the latest and that’s where you want to develop since every other distros will eventually use what Fedora uses.