I think that in general one might say that beginner friendly desktop distros have the most PH on Distrowatch. Mageia really is a great distro though, especially if you were a fan of Mandrake/Mandriva or are just looking for a rpm based desktop distro with a lot of customization options.

I think it is important to remember that Distrowatch "rankings" are in fact page-hit rankings. I think of it as a possible indicator of the amount of users that are curious about a distro that they're not currently using. If the rankings were more indicative of a distro's userbase it would look much different.

Thanks for explanation I could have not done it better myself. Thank you!

i have been using mageia 2, and fairly happy with it. i watch my dvds on it, though you have to know how to get it going, sort of had to do some digging there...i would not say its as stable as ubuntu,but its not bad....sort of agree with above post, rough around the edges..have not tryed 3beta.....as with any distro, seems to have to do some work to get things going....linux mint is easy that way....also, mageia is a france distro, and madriva got a lot of support from europe, as with mageia

Mageia is a french distro, but I haven't found that to be an issue at all. I run Mageia 3's rolling release (Cauldron) and find that it is not only more stable but much faster than Ubuntu/Mint, at least with both KDE and razorqt. What DE do you use?

Mageia does take a little more tweaking as sometimes it doesn't rock right out of the box, but it is well worth it and I would encourage you to continue to explore this wonderful distro!

perhaps not quite what it seems
 

that hits list could be comprimised for a couple of reasons: someone may be purposfully downloading multiple times so as to up the ranking, or perhaps people are downloading several times because it gets corrupted. Also, There are a copious numbers of mirrors out there. Perhaps that list includes those who maintain the mirrors.

I installed the Enlightenment spin of Mageia in a VM; it's quite a nice distro.

I wish Izzz a little bit smarter...
 

I just wish I was a little more fluent in yum, rpm, and such. I'm running it on a VM, and it seems like a well-oiled machine. I just don't know how to install the restricted codecs like I do in debian based distros. I can't be without my libdvdcss2. I think it's staying on top of the list because it found it's way toward the top, and people are trying it to see why. In a way, it's kinda dragging it's self along.

It's all right, but I felt like I got the old "bait and switch" when I tried it out at v.2. Wifi worked fine during the live session, but then was non-existent/unrecognized after hdd installation. Besides that, it just felt too hand-holding to me. And I just plain don't like RPM package management.

I agree. I can see how those distros could be more powerful, but when it comes to available packages, the deb distros just win every time. I am a tru linux user, but I also like to install something quickly, and have a reasonable expectation of it working the first time.

I don't mind configuring things myself (hell, I'm a Slackware, and now Gentoo user!), but if a distro "sells" itself as an easy-to-use, beginners distro, it damn well better "just work." In that respect, Linux Mint and (ugh) Ubuntu do a great job. If I just wanted to get up and running, right away, with a minimum of fuss and configuration, I'd probably just pick Crunchbang (based on Debian).

I was just commenting on YouTube about that. I tried crunchbang yesterday. I kinda liked it, but I can see how a novice user would get a little tripped up. I was suprised to discover it actually uses more resources than Lubuntu, while offering fewer user-friendly features. One thing it is very useful for though is if disk-space is an issue.

On my laptop, a Thinkpad T61, I get lower RAM usage with Crunchbang than I do with Lubuntu, both using the 64-bit versions. Idling, with no other apps running, Crunchbang 11 was about 160MB of RAM, whereas Lubuntu 12.04 was about 300MB. Too much for any distro running LXDE, with no other apps running, imo. I guess this stuff is subjective, though, YMMV.

12.04 was not a very good release. The problem with the Canonical releases is that often, due to the strict release-date schedule, some releases are less than desirable. Such was the case with 12.04, and 12.10. So much so, many of the ubuntu forks out there decided to skip those releases alltogether. Give 13.04 a try. It's a 1000% improvement.

For some reason, I feel compelled to try them, but I would never actually install and use any Ubuntu or derivative. I do actually like Linux Mint, despite my issue with green themes (haha), but I would choose to use LMDE before I would the Ubuntu versions. But I'm completely happy with Slackware, after being a long-time Debian user (the jury's still out on Gentoo).

That list is not counting downloads at all. It just displays how many page hits the distributions got on their respective Distrowatch site.