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Distribution: Debian Testing, Stable, Sid and Manjaro, Mageia 3, LMDE
Posts: 2,628
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The history of Mandriva is complex. Brasil, France and then Russia. Companies from those places have owned Mandriva.
When sold from the French outfit to the Russian outfit a number of Mandriva devs started Mageia. This is a community based project with the stated intention of producing the OS the users want to have.
They actually try very hard to achieve that.
The Russian outfit tried to come to some understanding with the Magea project for cooperation. Basically Magea would do the work and Mandriva would attempt to monitize it. Magea told them to piss off.
There was a bunch of users in Russia somewhere that had forked Mandriva also. This could, I emphasize could, be the Rosa folks. I didn't follow that closely at all.
But the outfit that owned Mandriva finally decided that they didn't want to support it and gave, at least, the Mandriva OS to this bunch with their own spin on Mandriva that went under a different name.
The distrowatch page has not been updated to reflect the sale from France to Russia. Nor has the Wikipedia page.
The newest version a casual search finds is 2011 for Mandriva. This includes the links here at LQ which do seem to be good even with the 3 year old version number.
DistroWatch does say Rosa is a fork of Mandriva. Could be. Where are they getting their code from? Could be they are doing it themselves and they may be using some from Magea and/or visa/versa for that matter. Looking at their home page I get the feeling that they are more aimed at enterprise deployment of the tools that they develop.
Magea is aimed mainly at a user desktop OS.
The development cycle is probably quite different.
Other than speculation, however, the only thing that can be decerned by looking at the web is that Rosa is headquartered in Russia and Magea in France.
To speculate further I will say that I doubt the Rosa devs spend as much time on the user forum as do the Magea devs. The Magea team takes, so far, their pledge to be directed by the wishes and needs of their users very seriously.
I would say that separates them quite a bit from most distros that are not a cult respin but one of the early forks of a foundation GNU/Linux distro (RH) back in 98 (Mandrake).
It is pretty plain that I admire the Magea team and its comunity. Note that I use Debian and have nothing else installed currently. I usually do have. Magea is going to be on here soon so I can keep an eye on it. I recommend it, or will again after checking that it has not gone strange, to noobs.
If you know someone with an aversion or simply fear of the cli the thing that makes the Mandrake lineage unique is the MCC (Mandrake, Mandriva, Magea Control Center) which is arguably the finest gui configuration tool for just about any OS no matter what variety.
Most of the old Mandriva forum users are active on the Magea forum. Some of them started with Mandrake.
The Rosa homepage calls their OS one for advanced users. I have no idea what that means, I will probably have to install it and find out, but it doesn't sound like they want to continue the tradition of Mandrake of making a beginner friendly OS.
I suppose that Rosa uses the urpmi cli based package manager and the same basic gui package management system as Magea. RPM is the heart of it. Urpmi works well. I prefer APT to RPM but that is me.
Documentation on urpmi is really great. At least on the Magea site but I am sure Rosa uses the same updated Mandriva based stuff so it should be just as good. One may be easier for one person and the other for another person.
Urpmq is the package search cli tool and it is very nice.
Setting up the "media" as they call the repositories is much easier in the gui than in cli but not that hard to figure out with the documentation if you, like my old box, would not boot to a desktop without non free firmware.
The system, as used by Mandriva up through 2011, and Magea is designed for gui use. Therefore the cli tools are little known and not made easier by a "media" system designed for configuration by check boxes in a gui.
Rosa may have changed some of this, I don't know. Yet.
To sum up, they share at least a historic code base but are completely different in organization, philosophy and goals.
Is one vastly superior to the other? YES. The one you like best.
When Mandriva went bankrupt in 2010, it was forced to institute a restructuring plan. As part of that plan it opted to liquidate its Edge-IT subsidiary. It was that subsidiary which had employed the people who built and maintained the Mandriva Linux distribution. The former Edge-IT employees together with a number of volunteer contributors created Mageia in the autumn of 2010.
Mageia, while originally forked from Mandriva, was established as a complete independent distribution. It has its own build system and builds all of its own packages.
Rosa wanted to acquire control of Mandriva, but the deal fell through because one major shareholder refused to sell. A new French shareholder took a leading role in Mandriva and decided to discontinue the production of a linux distribution.
The final Mandriva release, Mandriva 2011, was created with help from Rosa staff. Mandriva now sells Mandriva Business Server, which is a commercial enterprise linux distribution based on Mageia 2.
A number of volunteers, with support from Rosa and Mandriva, created OpenMandriva. Mandriva licensed the use of its name and handed over certain assets (the cooker repositories, the wiki and the rights to other documentation) to OpenMandriva.
OpenMandriva uses Rosa's build system and, to a limited extent, Rosa uses and contributes to cooker. OpenMandriva produces a linux distribution. Rosa, is a for profit organisation and produces a linux distribution (originally forked from Mandriva) as well as commercial products.
All three (Mageia, Rosa and OpenMandriva) maintain their own versions of urpmi and the drakxtools. As these are open source software they may import changes from other versions. Rosa is replacing some of the drakxtools and OpenMandriva has indicated an intention to eventually replace urpmi and the drakxtools with other software. (Since they apparently have no perl expertise, they prefer software that does not use perl.)
Being a committed Mageia user, and sometime contributor, I'm probably a bit biased.
But I find that it has taken all the best of Mandrake/Mandriva and added quite a bit, leaving behind much of the uncertainty of Mandriva (will it die tomorrow ?), as well as fixing a lot of persistant bugs.
True, there have been some glitches, as new more advanced functions have been added. Temporary problems, but evolving to a better product.
My only real complaint is personal. I should be doing more to contribute to Mageia's evolution.
I've been fickle with Mageia over the years. Really a fan of 3, then 4 I thought was utter rubbish (may have improved, I haven't used it since about 3 months after it was released when I removed it to go to something else). Thus far, I'm liking 5.
Last edited by Timothy Miller; 05-10-2015 at 07:28 PM.
I moved from windows when I figured out I would have to buy an xp disc when the HDD on my laptop died
this lead me to ubuntu8 all the way to 10, I got sick of the forum & the way unity was implimented
I looked around for a while trying to find a replacement that wasn't downstream of ubun, but still user friendly...
Mageia 1 fit the bill & actually is user friendly
the forum is ok, [your mileage may vary]
the userbase is big enough that a simple search will answer most questions
I'm on Mageia 5, I also help a couple of my neighbors with pc's I installed Mageia on
I have installed a few different desktop environments, used kde daily through Mageia 3
these days I'm on MATE, which lets me set-up the way I like, without the drain
I usually uncheck the check for new versions box & wait a month or so before moving to the next version.
upgrading to the next version online works fine, as does doing a clean install & keeping the home partition
I do clean installs with a dual arch cd, which is minimal [15 minutes] & install just what I like [a couple hrs]
I have an old single core intel pc which runs fine surfing or playing music
I would still try any deb based user friendly non-ubun distro should one pop up
I have been using Mageia v. 8 daily with no issues. In fact, it's on what for all intents and purposes is my primary machine, the one I'm using to type this right now.
Also, the online version upgrade went like butter.
(Yeah, I know this is a necro-thread, but I could not let this pass undisputed.)
so I've been using since Mandrake 9 in 2001
used Mandriva
now with Magiea 8 since v1
it has been my primary desktop distro all that time
my only issues has been with upgrading and that due to the fact I'm using old gear
issues with bios and uefi etc
and that I also had to upgrade video cards because of dropped support for old nvidia cards
I've had my kids as young as 3 or 4 using it to play games and do school stuff
I very rarely ever have to go under the hood to do terminal stuff
and laugh when I see newbies advised to do complex command line stuff on Mint, Ubuntu etc
when it is easy with the MCC
Mandrake's KDE implementation, along with MC, and Mandrake's URPMI rpm wrapper, are what originally kept me interested in Linux over 2 decades ago. It's never been my primary, but I've nearly always had at least one Cooker or Cauldron installation, and usually more spread across test PCs. I still have every Mageia since v3 installed somewhere or other, and still have several bootable Mandrake releases on my 32bit PCs. I consider Mageia the distro I'd switch to were it necessary to leave openSUSE, and don't hesitate to recommend it as a first distro alternative to Debian/Ubuntu and their derivatives. It has some pretty well seasoned drivers at its helm, and IME among the best user-supporters.
I have used Mandrake and Mandriva earlier. I had acquaintances with Mageia, but I did not install it on my computer. They are not my cup of tea, but they are respectable distros. I liked that they offered a choice of arrays of desktop environment/window managers. It is probably the easiest distros to hop from one DE/WM to another.
They resolve dependencies automatically, and update regularly. So, I do not see why they would not become popular they cover a lot of ground tick a lot of boxes for a good distro.
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