Comparing Mandriva, Mageia and PCLinux OS, what are the differences?
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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.
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.
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 "apt for rpm",, for package management.
Where the 3? "Mandrake OS's" (Mandrake/Mandriva, Mageia, FreeMandriva)
are using rpmdrake / urpmi.
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.
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.
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