Mageia 5 Has Been Delayed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mageia 5 Has Been Delayed

Mageia 5 has already experienced delays in getting out the earlier development releases while another development delay was just confirmed and will push back the final release of this Mandriva-derived distribution...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg3MTU

[blackout23]

Who is using Mageia and for what reasons? What does it offer that no other distro does? I have never seen an outspoken Mageia user.

[GreatEmerald]

I'm not personally using it, but it's definitely my recommended distribution for all people new to Linux. It's very user-friendly, classic, and yet has more advanced options if they're needed. They have a control centre and whatnot; I was amazed at the fact that its graphics configuration has a checkbox about using free or proprietary drivers, and switching between the two is just a click of a button. Last I checked their community is also very friendly.

And, well, it's the successor to Mandriva.

[MageiaFan27]

happy mageia user

Hi,
After 15 years using gentoo, learning a lot from always solving problems and trying out bleeding edge software I switched to the other extreme:
Mageia, it?s very friendly maintenance-wise and stable.
I also like the option to choose a lxqt desktop wich is my default.

[SebastianB]

Who is using Mageia and for what reasons? What does it offer that no other distro does? I have never seen an outspoken Mageia user.

Im not a user of magaia currently, but it actually has a very clear userbase that it targets. Its actually for intermediate/advanced users that don't feel too comfortable in distributions run by corporate interests like fedora, opensuse or ubuntu.

It drives me crazy how people writing reviews about distributions always spent like 90% of the time talking about things you spent the least amount of time with like the installer and which programs are preinstalled and how the wallpaper or theme of the desktop looks, instead of focusing what actually sets them apart from each other. Yes yes, ofc mageia has a control center like opensuse which is nice i guess. But what sets it apart from distributions like fedora, opensuse, ubuntu, debian etc is the policy about which packages are included, how they are included and why and when technological transitions like adaption of new init systems, filesystems etc get made, or the fact that they give out security advisories and actually care about backporting fixes.

For example Mageia not only includes propriety drivers like nvidia and the option to install and activate them, they also include steam in their repos. For what its worth they are standing in the corner of distros like arch and debian in that they are purely community driven, each with a slightly different take on what they do and how they do it but a community project nontheless. Fedora, opensuse, ubuntu will always be driven by decisions made by and for companies. They get assigned people by said companies and those people get told what to do based on what their customers want. Think about the switch to unity, and now mir in ubuntu. Or about fedora going sysv --> upstart --> systemd, branching into core, workstation and server. Or opensuse's yast omitting the most obviously useful features like activating and managing propriety drivers, their early switch to btrfs and how badly they cooperate with fedora like the dnf/zypper nih syndrome(do we really need 2 different frontends for the very same dependency solver that do exactly the same thing?).

There simply is alot of baggage that comes with running a corporate edition(tm) derived distribution. Not necessarily bad stuff, but alot of change introduced not so much because you as the user want or need it, but because its a stepping stone for their enterprise product or company strategy. Alot of design decisions like what canonical did with the unity desktop or Red Hats insistance on keeping gnome simple and configuration free so to not scare away their corporate workstation users. Again not necessarily bad, but it can feel stiffling and be a bit shocking how many technical and decision are influenced by corporate interests, some of it obviously spilling over into other distros because it affects upstream due to devs being paid by companies for certain work in upstream projects. Imagine how it feels being part of a community that has a "boss" like mr. shuttleworth. What if you disagree with something he wants? He is running a company and has a vision, he would be a helluva shitty ceo if he cared about what you wanted(even if it was thousands of you's) vs what he thinks will help his company succeed.


tl;dr: Mageia is a root community distro, like debian, arch, slackware or gentoo. I.e. its not derived from another distro, but from bootloader to desktop created by a community for a community. The only thing they care about are their immediate users, and that shows in many little things. They are also a "serious" distro in that they give out security advisories, run forums and mailing lists aswell provide irc channels. Imho they maybe the smallest of the "main" distros, but a main nontheless. If you can deal with the slightly older software thats due to its yearly release cycle you can do alot worse than picking mageia. Its one of my feel good distros, also alot less political crap than debian or arch aswell which can be like a vaction if your sick of that.

[droste]

[...]Or opensuse's yast omitting the most obviously useful features like activating and managing propriety drivers, their early switch to btrfs and how badly they cooperate with fedora like the dnf/zypper nih syndrome(do we really need 2 different frontends for the very same dependency solver that do exactly the same thing?).[...]

openSUSE with zypper using libsolv was already there and working before DNF was even planned. So I wouldn't say it's NIH by openSUSE
And the reason for Fedora to create a different front end are also somewhat understandable. They wanted to have an API that is at least to a reasonable point compatible to YUM.
What people tend to forget is that even if Fedora would be using zypp from openSUSE that wouldn't make packages between those two totally compatible, because base packages are packed in different granularities and even different names. So the dependencies would not be easy to express for both systems. So I would say having joint forces to work on the hard problem (dependency solving with libsolv) and a separate easier part (UI) is not a bad way to do these things.

/edit:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF#Why_not_zif.2Fzypp.3F

[Sonadow]

Ehh, I have been using Mageia (i'm still on v2) and I'm not impressed.

• URPMI is still a terrible package manager. I'd take yum / dnf / zypper / apt any day over urpmi.
• They were the slowest to switch to GRUB2 (by default)
• They are also one of the slowest 'main' distributions to support UEFI boot
• their packages can sometimes tend to be more than 1 major version behind upstream. Not acceptable for certain types of users.

And I still do not know whether Mageia has adopted the /usr merge. As someone who has gotten used to it in OpenSUSE and Fedora, i find that it simplifies the file hierarchy quite a fair bit.

Im not a user of magaia currently, but it actually has a very clear userbase that it targets. Its actually for intermediate/advanced users that don't feel too comfortable in distributions run by corporate interests like fedora, opensuse or ubuntu.

It drives me crazy how people writing reviews about distributions always spent like 90% of the time talking about things you spent the least amount of time with like the installer and which programs are preinstalled and how the wallpaper or theme of the desktop looks, instead of focusing what actually sets them apart from each other. Yes yes, ofc mageia has a control center like opensuse which is nice i guess. But what sets it apart from distributions like fedora, opensuse, ubuntu, debian etc is the policy about which packages are included, how they are included and why and when technological transitions like adaption of new init systems, filesystems etc get made, or the fact that they give out security advisories and actually care about backporting fixes.

For example Mageia not only includes propriety drivers like nvidia and the option to install and activate them, they also include steam in their repos. For what its worth they are standing in the corner of distros like arch and debian in that they are purely community driven, each with a slightly different take on what they do and how they do it but a community project nontheless. Fedora, opensuse, ubuntu will always be driven by decisions made by and for companies. They get assigned people by said companies and those people get told what to do based on what their customers want. Think about the switch to unity, and now mir in ubuntu. Or about fedora going sysv --> upstart --> systemd, branching into core, workstation and server. Or opensuse's yast omitting the most obviously useful features like activating and managing propriety drivers, their early switch to btrfs and how badly they cooperate with fedora like the dnf/zypper nih syndrome(do we really need 2 different frontends for the very same dependency solver that do exactly the same thing?).

There simply is alot of baggage that comes with running a corporate edition(tm) derived distribution. Not necessarily bad stuff, but alot of change introduced not so much because you as the user want or need it, but because its a stepping stone for their enterprise product or company strategy. Alot of design decisions like what canonical did with the unity desktop or Red Hats insistance on keeping gnome simple and configuration free so to not scare away their corporate workstation users. Again not necessarily bad, but it can feel stiffling and be a bit shocking how many technical and decision are influenced by corporate interests, some of it obviously spilling over into other distros because it affects upstream due to devs being paid by companies for certain work in upstream projects. Imagine how it feels being part of a community that has a "boss" like mr. shuttleworth. What if you disagree with something he wants? He is running a company and has a vision, he would be a helluva shitty ceo if he cared about what you wanted(even if it was thousands of you's) vs what he thinks will help his company succeed.

That has benefited us in more ways than we can recollect. Pulseaudio, systemD, Wayland are but just some examples that have brought a great deal of standardization to what was previously a crapfest of alternate NIH solutions. In fact, if it wasn't for the growing popularity of these commercially-backed-but-community-developed distributions the driver situation in Linux will still be at the same state as it were back in 2000 where virtually nothing works and we have to go back to cherry picking specific hardware. It's only when commercial entities push Linuxas an alternative that vendors sit up and take notice, and start to consider the feasibility of releasing Linux versions of their software / drivers.

[GreatEmerald]

I don't completely agree with either. Fedora an openSUSE are community-driven, the enterprise features are just added on top of them (Fedora didn't have the classic GNOME interface until RHEL was released with it IIRC). As for drivers and such, the big distributions need to be very careful about the whole license situation, so it makes sense to me. And what does switching to Btrfs have to do with enterprise anyway? That's like the opposite of what people on workstations want to happen, but it's something that's very useful for desktop users.

As for what Sonadow said: yea, it's a conservative distribution, surprise surprise!

[SebastianB]

openSUSE with zypper using libsolv was already there and working before DNF was even planned. So I wouldn't say it's NIH by openSUSE
And the reason for Fedora to create a different front end are also somewhat understandable. They wanted to have an API that is at least to a reasonable point compatible to YUM.
What people tend to forget is that even if Fedora would be using zypp from openSUSE that wouldn't make packages between those two totally compatible, because base packages are packed in different granularities and even different names. So the dependencies would not be easy to express for both systems. So I would say having joint forces to work on the hard problem (dependency solving with libsolv) and a separate easier part (UI) is not a bad way to do these things.

/edit:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Featur..._zif.2Fzypp.3F

But thats what i meant, opensuse zypper is much further along than dnf, it has been used for quite some while as default. Also its not about being able to use same rpms, its about not having to relearn the syntax of two programs instead of one in a homogenous network. Its just annoying, especially as to me zypper seems to be much better and intuitive. You can just use normal abbreviations for most stuff, zypper in for install, zypper ar for add repo or zypper si for source install. You hardly even need to read the manpage ...

@GreatEmerald
Features are added ontop? You mean features like a total lack of packages that don't have a free license even if they are essential to running the system(My nvidia geforce 660 card reliably corrupts output within 10min on nouveau)? Or ubuntus road with unity, ubstart and mir? Was it the community that said screw wayland lets go our own way? Was it the community that enforced CLAs on everything? Yeah that was ubuntu, but its about as community driven as fedora is, the only difference is in the stance their respective companies take on certain issues. As too btrfs, SuSE heavily markets their snapper roll back feature, of which btrfs is a central aspect.

The thing is community driven distros don't have to worry about licenses by vendors that much, neither nvidia nor amd are going to come cracking down on them for offering the option to download their drivers in a installer, its only ever a problem for corporate lead ones because they have lawyers breathing down their neck(atleast the people employed in the companies while also involved in the community have).

Im not arguing that fedora and opensuse are community driven, they are. The have big and nice communities that do alot of good for the linux ecosystem as a whole. But more often than not those in leading positions of key projects in these distros are also employed by the respective "parent" companies. Which means being subject to corporate decisions. Which can be good or bad, imho its mostly good on the RH side and mostly bad on the canonical side but ymmv.

[t_m_b]

Ehh, I have been using Mageia (i'm still on v2) and I'm not impressed.[*]They were the slowest to switch to GRUB2 (by default)

And that is a good thing considering its flawed design ...

A bootloader is supposed to be small, fast and simple. just take over from bios/uefi and hand the hw to the kernel ...

Not trying to be a kernel on its own wich grub2 is trying to do with a gazillion modules probing hw and from time to
time setting it up badly...

[*]They are also one of the slowest 'main' distributions to support UEFI boot

Yeah, this is something that sadly got delayed for various reasons, so Mga4 got initial experimental support for it, and Mga 5 will have better support for it.

[*]their packages can sometimes tend to be more than 1 major version behind upstream. Not acceptable for certain types of users.

This is usually down to not enough maintainers as we are a community distribution.

And I still do not know whether Mageia has adopted the /usr merge. As someone who has gotten used to it in OpenSUSE and Fedora, i find that it simplifies the file hierarchy quite a fair bit.

Yep, we did the Usr Move in Mga3