I tried Mageia 1 and liked it.

Drakx is a pretty solid installer, the only drawback is that you can't cancel changes you make to the partition table and you have to restart all over.

Wifi and sound worked flawlessly. I liked some unique custom utilities like drakfont to install a font.

urpmi has its advantages and drawbacks. For example, its --fuzzy option isn't used by default, so unless you know the exact package name you couldn't install it (you had to search for it first). In Ubuntu, it could at least give you a list of possible packages that matched more or less so you didn't have to search for package names before issuing the second apt-get install. In urpmi, you have to search, then call urpmi again.

The --test option could be optimized to not download the package before testing if it can be installed or not, like Sabayon equo's --pretend option does.

Also, the lack of dummy packages can be problematic. For example, if you want to install the apache http server, in ubuntu it would be apt-get install apache2 or something like that, on mageia :

confusing the user. Notice all the given choices are experimental ? confusing the user even more. Say for example your choice is 1, now you have :
Ending in a conflict anyway...


Some urpmi options could be better named. For example, I would rather have a urpmi --reinstall than urpmi --replacepkgs which is non-intuitive.

If installing a package fails, the next attempt will redownload the package. It could be at least kept in a temporary cache to save for bandwidth.

To install a printer, you have to do three installs in three different operations instead of just one operation for all the three installs. I don't know why you have to do it in three parts like this.

urpmf is quite handy and installed by default, unlike, say, apt-file which you must install by yourself. It lets you find which package has a file you are missing (often a missing .h file or an .so library)

One nice thing about urpmi is that you can use it even if rpmdrake is running. You can't run apt-get while synaptic is running. So the package manager in mageia must be intelligent enough to not lock its subsystem unless really necessary, unlike ubuntu's.

Some package names can be misleading. For example, I thought that installing postgresql-9.0 would actually install postgresql database server. Wrong. It installs the postgresql database client !

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In the beginning I was a big fan of Mageia, but as of late it's gotten buggier and buggier. In fact the network sharing hasn't worked since version 6. I kept reporting the issue but it fell on deaf ears. I left it for PCLinuOS which is a lot less buggy and everything as needed and works like it supposed to. I have 30+ other users that need internet sharing and it just doesn't work in Mageia 8 which is the latest version just released last week.

Since you mention PCLinuxOS, I will bring up some remarks that made me
hesitant to even try it.

1/ outstanding support

I hear people say PCLOS has outstanding support whilst there are like
9 users on IRC and forum registration is closed and is a manual process
(you have to mail the admin, which I did, but never heard of him ever
...)

2/ LxQT can't be installed alone

You must install apps with it, presumably, and once you do, you can't
remove the excess apps (eg. : unwanted music/media players)

Your feedback welcome.

Yes, OpenMandriva - although it's based on ROSA, which was forked from Mandriva Linux.

1. Emailing for registration is not unique to this distro, and it's really the most reliable and simple method to keep out spam. I certainly prefer it to endless wrestling with captcha. As for not getting a reply, administrators are not professional staff and they do have a life! If at first you don't succeed, try again…

2. The LXQT version is a community version — an unofficial version produced by a few users, not by the development team. Naturally, it will do what its creators want it to!

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