Wow Magiea is receiving as many hits per day as the wildly successful and popular Ubuntu (2,100 hits per day) on Distrowatch yet there's barely any activity in this sub forum for it. What gives? Why is Magiea so all-of-a-sudden popular anyway? What does it have that Ubuntu doesn't?

That is a good question.
I recently read, somewhere, that someone thought it was a train wreck. Have not tried it myself and this comment could be unfair.

Mageia is latest incarnation of the original Mandrake distribution. Mandrake and Red Hat were the original big players for desktop distros. With this said, Mandrake - Mandriva - Mageia has 14 years of history and many loyal supporters and users.

I used Mandrake in the early days and it got me hooked on linux.

PCLOS forked from Mandrake as well and is hugely popular.

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I am a Debian branch Linux user but have always kind of liked Mandriva.

Installed Mageia on here on my external enclosure which is my test platform.

I certainly do not see it as a train wreck. I installed Xfce and it is functioning fine.

There are a few rough spots that one would expect in a relatively new distro. Particularly in the Mandrake branch of things when you have folks creating a community based distro.

They seem, however, well organized and I am rather excited about the thing. Has been a rough few years for Mandriva and I think this may be a very good thing.

I miss the thrills of testing having given up my addiction to Ubuntu testing. Am trying to get up to speed on Mageia so that I can start playing with their Cauldrin. I think that they are a group well deserving of some support.

The release that I have installed, Mageia 2, is a fairly conservative offering. Nothing really flashy or particularly cutting edge. Just a nice solid, for the most part, release. The glitches are not system threatening and I am not sure that they are not caused mainly by my crappy video card. They are minor irritants that I can ignore while becoming familiar with the system.

I am not listing them as I am more and more convinced that it is my hardware that is the problem.

I would recommend giving it a look with a Live Session to see for yourself what you think of it.

I suspect that with the history of Mandriva being a "easy, noob friendly" distro a lot of folks are looking to Mageia to be, perhaps, the distro that they suggest to noobs instead of Ubuntu. This is certainly a motivation for my interest.

I run Cauldron which is basically a rolling pre-alpha 3 release. I don't know why there is not more discussion here, but it is a solid distro. As widget stated it will definetely attract allot of Mandrake/Mandriva fans. IMHO it is the best desktop distro for KDE with x86_64 arch support. I can't speak for Gnome as I am not a fan but LXDE and E17 work well as well.

The Distrowatch hit rankings are in no way an indicator for the popularity of a distro and shouldn't be taken serious. In the past there were some (successful) attempts to spoil that, it says nothing more than how many people per day have connected to the different sites on Distrowatch, but not how many people have visited the real Mageia page, have downloaded it or are even using it.

It really has been a beast on distrowatch though. I've been monitoring it and i think it's only gone down once in the past month or so that i've observed.
Personally, i had issues with Mageia, and i sopped using it shortly after installing. Sadly my data limit is expensive so it is disappointing to me. My issues are that it did not have checkinstall in the repos, but mainly that my self and others had issues with network manager under kde, where is would freeze the entire plasma-desktop. I gave a review here at LQ.

This is very true, as obviously there are many more Ubuntu users or Fedora users (#4 in PHs) than Mageia users; however, over the last year the Mageia userbase and community have grown quite a bit. I'm not saying it will become more popular then Ubuntu anytime in the near future, but I do think you will see its' userbase continue to grow. I also think that Kubuntu or other KDE-based distro users are more likely to convert than a those that prefer GNOME. (Just MHO)

Disruptive technology!

probably because Mageia have their own busy forums

I imagine it will gain popularity from old Mandriva bods returning to see what it is like. Must admit I'm tempted. I might install in a VM or old laptop first to see what it is like.

I curently have Mageia 2 and 3 installed.

Mageia 3 is still an alpha. It is better than Mageia 2 at this point.

M2 is a bit rough around the edges but a good OS. M3 looks great and runs great, at least on my hardware.

considering the ease of installing nvidia drivers
when I look around some forums and people are downloading
and manually installing drivers with CLI
and all it was in Mageia, was a couple of clicks in MCC and a reboot

Several distros have a repo that makes the Nvidia drivers easy to install. People will often avoid these repos for foo distro, and compile there own so they have the latest ones available instead. Or at least i've observed many that choose this path at the Opensuse forums at least.

The rankings on Distrowatch not always mean they are the best distributions, there are a few not ranking so good and they do great job, Puppy Linux, PCLinux, Pinguy and some others I consider them to be more functional than Mageia but I guess it is a mater of taste, needs and the hardware you are working on.

Cough!* Mepis!