Mageia 3 Released 89
Freshly Exhumed writes "Forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, Mageia Linux has hit a new release milestone. Trish at the Mageia blog announces: 'All grown up and ready to go dancing: Mageia 3's out! We still can't believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we've been doing it for two and a half years. For people who can't wait, get it here; release notes are here. To upgrade from Mageia 2, see here.'" Adds reader hduff: "It offers cutting edge and stable versions of your favorite applications and desktop environments as well as a version of the STEAM gaming software."
Re:what is the point of forking a distro ? (Score:0, Informative)
No, it's a case of "you are unreliable and not very trustworthy, we'll take the code and do things the right way."
BTW; Kubuntu is probably one of the most pointless distributions around anyway. It's just Ubuntu with - usually - an exceptionally broken KDE on top. Sometimes I think the rationale for Kubuntu is to give KDE a bad name.
If you want a good KDE experience, Opensuse is probably the best bet, possibly together with Mageia.
Re:what is the point of forking a distro ? (Score:5, Informative)
I may be wrong, but I think the french-based original Mandriva was almost dying one year ago, for various reasons among which a basic economic one (founders split and close to bankrupcy, not reactive...). they apparently turned to other customers than the average end-user.
I did use Mandriva seriously 3 years ago then dropped it on the occasion of an update deleting everything and not recovering from the backup...
Mandriva was cooler than Ubuntu, actually automating many hardware handling, and less hegemonic -I'm going to look seriously into Mageia, yes.
Re:what is the point of forking a distro ? (Score:5, Informative)
The original programmers took the Mandriva 2010.x distribution, forked it, updated it and made the Mageia (mage-ee-ah) 1 distribution, which actually worked.
Mageia 2 moved to systemd (*spit*) but generally didn't break backwards compatibility. I've been running the pre-release version of Mageia 3 on a server for the last month or so (because the chipset needed a newer kernel than previous releases had) and it's been very stable.
Subsequently, Mandriva's management have had a small rethink and are now basing their server distribution upon Mageia (because it actually works).
Of all the Linux distributions I've found the Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia family to be the least primitive and actually work, both in a scientific computing desktop role and a server roll. They're generally hassle free and the update and upgrade system practically flawless.
Thanks to all! (Score:2, Informative)
As a Mageia packager, I can report that it was indeed really fun and enriching working on Mageia 3.
We have to thank the whole friendly community, which provided code, tests, reports, fixes, documentation, translations, comments and donations. Our goal is to make a great community distribution for everyone, with an emphasis on the ease of use and on empowering users and making them part of a community.
We hope you'll like it if you give it a try!
Now let's start the work on support and on Mageia 4.