Mageia has several disks available: live CDs for KDE and Gnome, an installation CD for LXDE, and an installation DVD for all three. I tested the 32-bit DVD. The site documentation is good and the installer easy to use, with pop-up help available. It offers various configurations, and to start with I chose the default KDE desktop. Encryption was not offered.

KDE was implemented with less clutter than in some distros, but it was still too slow on my hardware. I was able to make a considerable improvement by disabling Nepomuk: why was it running by default? The software included Firefox, Kmail, LibreOffice, Scribus, Gimp, Amarok, Totem, and Dragon player. When run from a terminal, Kmail, Scribus, and Amarok left serious warnings. The package manager has no help installed and was set up to use the DVD: you need to click on Options and Media manager, and then select six repositories.

Patented codecs are supposed to installable from the Tainted repository, but don’t expect to find them by searching for “codecs”. In practice, mp3 files played. Videos were a different matter. Totem complained that the sound format wasn’t supported and offered to download the codec. Even after that, neither Totem nor Dragon worked properly, but I had success installing VLC from the Tainted repository (there’s another VLC in Core without codecs!) There’s a tool in the Configuration Centre that supposedly selected my USB speakers, but they only worked with Amarok: presumably it’s configuring Phonon rather than ALSA.

I tried another installation, this time a custom one with the Ice window manager. It was confusing compared with a similar operation in CentOS or OpenSUSE, but it worked. I got a very minimal version of Ice (no file manager) and an odd selection of software: Firefox, Scribus, Homebank, Dia, Gimp, and an alpha-test version of the audio player Enjoy. So, why hadn’t the default installation given me Dia or Homebank?

As a distro defaulting to KDE, Mageia invites comparison with Mepis and OpenSUSE. Both of these are better behaved and offer encryption. Mint and Salix are also easy, reliable distros offering KDE. That’s four reasons for not using Mageia.

I have been eager to give Mageia a go for some time. I held off until version 2 was released. I constantly read how happy people were with it. It sounded great.
My limited experience with Mandriva was when i was first beginning Gnu/Linux last year, and i could not get my mobile broadband to work with the network managing gui. Mageia has continued to use the same program for managing networks. I can still not obtain a connection. I decided to remove it and install network manager instead. I downloaded all the rpms needed and got it going. I was able to connect. I was using kde. Once a connection was established, something very odd occurred. I could no longer open any new windows. If a terminal had been left open from before establishing a connection, and then a program was lauched from that, it would fail with X errors. Once the connection was closed down, things would work again. I tried the gnome applet and the kde applet, and the issue continued to occur. It is a known bug that was reported in the betas, but was never fixed. I decided to remove network manage and instead comile it from source. No build tools are insalled by default, so i installed them, but then found that checkinstall was not in the repos. That was it for me. I had a horrible experience and would like to rate this lower, but since i did not get the chance to see how well the rest of the product works, i've given it a generous 5.
If you require network manager, don't try Mageia.

I was really hoping for Mageia 2 to come out and had really high hopes with it but were shattered right after full installation.
I selected all the desktops and WM's and hoped full installation, still a lot of things went missing like kpp and virtualbox to name a few.
The package manager confuses you and still not implemented well. At least one repository could have been enabled right after by default rather than those annoying pop ups about missing media and all.
kde looks good but slows down everything else.
E17 installation was broken without any mention of how and why. PCmanFM never opened.
I don't want to crib anymore but I'm not going to suggest it to my Linux-newbie friends.