Mageia 6 has been released
blog.mageia.org
blog.mageia.org
There are still things in this distro, that others haven't picked up that well on.
The Mageia Control Center can do basically anything you would want. It can detect printers and find the right driver and setup for you.
There is Draknet, that just works for me. I despise Network Manager and WICD, they have horrible UX in my opinion. I hear good things about the netctl in Arch Linux, bet that is specific to that distro aa far as I am aware.
In my experience it is an RPM-based distro that is well executed. I tried Fedora around version 14 till 16, but just gave up for a lot of reasons. They say it is really good now, but they said it back then too. I haven't tried SuSe in years, but I never liked Yast.
Well, in the end it all comes down to personal preference I suppose. I always loved Mandrake/Mandriva. I tried Fedora for 2 years. Tried Debian for 3 years even. But I am happy to be using Mageia again on my desktop/server and laptop.
It is quite polished I have to say, and there used to be some config-parts in Mageia Control Center for server stuff. I assume they still are.
There are many contributors with their own expertise, like the person for OpenLDAP. It is also quite strongly built around Perl. If you like to automate stuff with Perl, you will be very happy.
Mageia Control goes way back to probably 1999. I don't understand why other distro's haven't picked it up. Most distro's have nothing in this regard, just an installer and the DE control center. I assume it is politics or NIH, but I honestly don't know or understand.
There's a preview release of it in Mageia 6 as "manatools".
In addition, development of the new tools is on GitHub: https://github.com/manatools
I guess I'm spoiled by Arch.
If you want to try a Linux that needs no care and attention, I would suggest you try this one.
However, for multimedia, it has everything in the main repositories. For stuff that may be encumbered in some way, they are shipped in the "tainted" repository, which can be activated separately.
Likewise for nonfree software/firmware.
Haven’t tried Mageia lately.
A few months later, I bought a copy of "Linux France" (or maybe it was another magazine?) that came with a CD of Mandrake 6.1. Thanks to the French instructions in the magazine, I was able to install Mandrake without issues and they gave instructions on how to use kppp to connect to the Internet. Since kppp looked similar to the modem connection utility from Windows 95/98, I felt comfortable and for the first time, I was able to go on the Internet with Linux! (Also, I believe that it detected my winmodem, which was probably the main problem I had with Slackware and Red Hat.)
From then on, I basically never looked back: I learned how to operate a Linux machine, I learned English, I learned to program, and 18 years later, though I haven't used Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia in years, I am still very thankful that it existed when it did and opened up a whole new world to me. I hope that this release of Mageia can do the same for another 15-16 year-old who's interested in computers, wants to run Linux, but feels intimidated.