I've tried Mageia on and off for years now. Last experience I remember was Mageia 2 which had a
sweet wallpaper that I loved.
I stopped for years as I had gotten used to *buntu distros (including Mint, Netrunner OS, and elementary), but over the past few days I've noticed things that might bode ill for Ubuntu and it's family.
[Strong opinions on Ubuntu ahead, please don't take offence]
Ubuntu 16.04 is a slug insofar as going from login to desktop. Judging from other reviews not only am I not alone, but all Ubuntu derivatives seem to be suffering from it to one degree or another as well. Newer versions might have improved for all I know, but still...
Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE are in serious need of a cosmetic overhaul as well. Ambiance is ugly as sin, and was introduced nearly a decade ago! Imagine if Microsoft kept the same theme going from Windows 95 to Windows XP (and now past that too). Sure, Unity 8 is coming in
15.10,
16.04,
16.10, 18.04. Honestly, this whole Unity 8 fiasco seems to have occurred due to the post-PC fever that happened sometime around the same time as Windows 8 was released. Both MS and Canonical latched onto the "convergence" hype. Microsoft eventually wised up on this, but Canonical is still chasing that idea and the convergence push they're making seems to just be delaying Unity 8. As a side note: I remember way back in 2012-2013 when Shuttleworth said that "Mir would be more relevant than Wayland in 4 years".
And finally: Snap packages. Canonical is pushing these like no tomorrow, which really bothers me (a link to the G+ post in my sig pretty much explains why).
And others have talked about regressions that were once somewhat easily solvable but are now nearly impossible for them to work around.
[Diatribe on *buntus over, back to the scheduled program]
So, no more *buntus for me. But where to go from there? And then I remembered Mageia and went in today, installing it on a spare desktop at my house.
Installation was a difficult task. I had to do a lot of work with a few tools to get the partitions right and I haven't fixed a sudoers problem yet (though that might just be laziness on my part). In all: a rocky start.
But frankly, it was worth it.
KDE 4 SC (which is the desktop used on Mageia 5.1) isn't the latest and greatest, but I like it more than the current KDE 5 (which feels a bit rough to me still). Not the prettiest looking thing, but much better than Unity's Ambience theme and purple/orange color scheme.
I'm still getting settled in here as I need to learn a few things again (I was used to apt-get, but urpmi seems simple enough), not to mention get some wanted software and get the theme tweaked. But so far things are looking good!
Mageia 5.1: a rocky start today, but I think I'm falling in love!
