Just got Mageia up and running
 

It was time for a change. My desktop needed a new hard drive and I had Linux Mint on both my laptop and my desktop. After finding out that there was, in fact, a worthy successor to Mandrake, (1st Linux distro I ever used)



:) :)



there was only one thing left to do. Install it. I had also figured out I'd try Sabayon first and even both Solaris 10 and 11.4. Those were miserable busts. The solaris operating systems had NO drivers whatsoever & even though Sabayon's live DVD ran flawlessly, it just wouldn't install & I already posted about that.


This one was the last on my list of potential Mint replacements because I haven't ever tried it before, but heard about it elsewhere. It seems that the third time is the charm.

It's been a few years since I installed Mageia. I installed the KDE version (Plasma) and found it to be nice, but I got frequent desktop lockups. I am sure things have changed now; that was 2 or 3 years ago.

Mandrake was my first Linux distro as well. KDE 1.0, no clue what kernel version, probably 2-something. Moved on to Gnome from there because KDE reminded me too much of windows.

My first serious exploration outside the world of OS/2 Warp was Redhat 5.0, whose Gnome nearly turned me off of Linux entirely. Next foot in the water was Mandrake 7.0, released over two decades ago, January 2000, with kernel 2.2.14 and kdebase 1.1.2. KDE stuck to me tenaciously. I'm still using exclusively 3.5.x on my main PC, and use its fork TDE on several others, including Mageia 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 (though not actively on the NLS oldies).

Funny, I loved Gnome until version 3: was a tester, a mod on Gnome support forums, used it for years, we even share a birthday, except in year :) Hate it now. How things have changed. I really like plasma now though but don’t use it ; more of a window manager user anymore.

I've been using Mageia on various machines since v. 3 and have become quite fond of it. Now that you can choose from multiple DEs, I pick KDE/Plasma because I really like many of the KDE applications, but I usually use Fluxbox for my GUI.

I've been going back to and trying out distros that I haven't run in a long time. I had also used Mandrake years ago after first dipping my toes into Linux with Red Hat 5 (about 1999-2000).

I was pleasantly surprised upon installing Mageia with Xfce yesterday, that it had retained ALL of the settings that I had changed in the live session. Pretty cool. If there are other distros that are able to do this, I don't know about 'em!

I have switched over to using KDE Plasma 5 on all distros I use; it has really matured to a great DE, and resource usage is good, too. I like that Mageia also installs icewm with KDE; good to have a very light fallback WM sometimes.

PS: MX Linux, I have discovered, also retains changes made in the live session to the installation. I think this is a great idea that more distros should consider.

I have been quite happily using Mageia on at least one machine since v. 3. I currently have v. 8 on my primary desktop. Fluxbox runs quite nicely on it.

Many of the members of my LUG use it also. A lot of them started with Mandrake (mumble) years ago and just stuck with it through its various mutations.

Just minutes ago I finished setting up a box containing 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 on it to upgrade 8 to Cauldron/9 by cloning 8's partition over top of 5's. Mandrake 7.0 provided my first exposure to KDE around 22 years ago. I'm still using KDE 3, both as KDE 3, and as its fork TDE.