Comparing Mandriva, Mageia and PCLinux OS, what are the differences?
 

Greetings,
Could someone be kind enough to explain the similarites, differences and purposes of Mandriva, Mageia and PCLinuxOS? All three seem to be pretty similar from what I can see, surely there are differnces and different purposes to each. I do know that Mandriva is a commercial-driven entity, whereas Mageia is a community-driven project. I'm not sure about PCLinuxOS.

Thank you

When Mandrake was bought by a company and became Mandriva, the development team disagreed with the direction the corporate interest wanted to go. They left and formed Mageia. So it is not a surprise that the two have similarities.

PCLinux? I have not done any research on that distro.;)

PCLinuxOS uses "apt for rpm",, for package management.

Where the 3? "Mandrake OS's" (Mandrake/Mandriva, Mageia, FreeMandriva)
are using rpmdrake / urpmi.

Mandriva SA (the company behind the distribution) released their end-user distribution "Mandriva Linux" to an independent entity called "OpenMandriva" which is coordinated by a non-profit French "association". Mageia was founded in September 2010 before OpenMandriva and is also non-profit. The founders of Mageia were ex-employees of a subordinate Mandriva company called "Edge IT". Mandriva SA had to close the department of the end-user distribution as it wasn't profitable enough and Mandriva SA had financial difficulties.

As far as OpenMandriva is concerned they have close ties with a Russian company called ROSAlabs who provided a different flavour of the KDE desktop where as Mageia uses more "vanilla" KDE-components. Mageia currently has version 4, OpenMandriva's version is called "OpenMandriva Lx 2013". PCLinuxOS is AFAIK a Rolling-Release distribution and is from the US.

PCLinuxOS uses init to boot the OS, where as Mageia and Mandriva uses systemd.

Systemd stops the user from interrupting and altering the boot sequence AND reading the system logs in plain text.

Which to me, flys in the face of the FOSS traditions.

The Latest version of PCLinuxOS is 2014, I'm using the KDE Full Monty 64bit Edition.

It's "Radically Simple"

It uses pulse-audio, but so do most Distros. (pulse-audio is not human readable source code (non-FOSS))

I hope this helps.

Regards Glenn

Could someone kindly explain the differences, using small words?

I use PCLinuxOS (KDE and Trinity) but seems like every distro I've liked well enough to seriously consider as a daily driver, all the way back, was a Mandrake descendant. If PCLOS didn't exist, Mageia was my next choice; only reason it lost out was that it runs a bit heavier on the same hardware, and wasn't quite as good at finding all the body parts. Since then I've become a fan of the rolling release (reinstalling is against my religion), which gives me another reason to stick where I am. But far as what you see on your screen out here in userville? similar enough to be comfortable, if you had to switch among 'em.

I don't know exactly where apt-get and synaptic come from, but I think I saw them in use in a Debian install I did back in 2005.

So, these programs are package installers, if you're using the rolling release of PcLinuxOs (like me) you are familiar with one or both of them.

Apt and Synaptic have been adapted to work on rpm's instead of .deb packages as used in Debian and some others (Ubuntu).

The rpm (RedHat)package manager is another popular package manager.

urpmi is not available on PcLinuxOs although rpm (on the command line) is.

APT-RPM and Synaptic were created by Conectiva, whose name was mixed with Mandrake to became Mandriva.

Mandriva was an enterprise, and also a rpm-based Linux distro.

Nowadays Synaptic is used mainly by debian-based distros, and I was surprised to find it within PCLinuxOS, before to know its history.

Another main difference between Mageia and PCLinuxOS is the use of SystemD in Mageia and other modern distros,

For me, systemd made it very difficult to read log files and to make changes in config files
when I had a (hand rolled) kernel or desktop manager (mostly xorg.conf) that would not boot all the way to a gui.

This occurred when upgrading graphics cards, wireless cards, USB mobile data access, USB audio and some others I've forgotten.
(I haven't had to roll my own kernel for quite some time :-) )

And, I found out that like PulseAudio the code did not comply with FOSS standards of code written in readable plain English.

I still prefer a system that can be hacked to behave the way I am accustomed to.

I hope this helps.

Glenn