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In case anyone wonders, why still Mageia (the old Mandrake/Mandriva)? There are still things in this distro, that others haven't picked up that well on. The M

by mpol 9y ago

In case anyone wonders, why still Mageia (the old Mandrake/Mandriva)? 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.

systems 9y ago
is it server friendly .. or mostly a desktop distro?
- mpol 9y ago
  My server needs are mostly home server, so my experience is mostly from that. I run a webserver with Apache/PHP/MySQL. I run Dovecot and Postfix. MPD even as a music player daemon. It does use systemd, but as usual, I assume it is to trim down on development time. The defaults are often quite sane, and a lot of thought has been put into integration of services. 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.
jadbox 9y ago
If Mageia Control Center is so much better than KDE's, why hasn't it been adopted into Plasma? All these new distros seem like they are fracturing the community more than helping the greater ecosystem, but tbh I haven't looked too far into this distro/community.
- mpol 9y ago
  You will have to ask the Plasma people :) One reason might be that it is written in Perl - GTK. 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.
  - Conan_Kudo 9y ago
    There's an ongoing effort to rework MCC into something more flexible, called ManaTools. Unlike MCC, ManaTools offers Qt 5, GTK+ 3, and ncurses UIs through the usage of the libyui library. 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 https://github.com/manatools

by mpol 9y ago

systems 9y ago

is it server friendly .. or mostly a desktop distro?

mpol 9y ago
My server needs are mostly home server, so my experience is mostly from that. I run a webserver with Apache/PHP/MySQL. I run Dovecot and Postfix. MPD even as a music player daemon. It does use systemd, but as usual, I assume it is to trim down on development time. The defaults are often quite sane, and a lot of thought has been put into integration of services. 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.

jadbox 9y ago

If Mageia Control Center is so much better than KDE's, why hasn't it been adopted into Plasma? All these new distros seem like they are fracturing the community more than helping the greater ecosystem, but tbh I haven't looked too far into this distro/community.

mpol 9y ago
You will have to ask the Plasma people :) One reason might be that it is written in Perl - GTK. 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.
- Conan_Kudo 9y ago
  There's an ongoing effort to rework MCC into something more flexible, called ManaTools. Unlike MCC, ManaTools offers Qt 5, GTK+ 3, and ncurses UIs through the usage of the libyui library. 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 https://github.com/manatools