I installed from the Gnome live CD version and found the process easy and fast (15 minutes).

There was a generous amount of software for a CD, and all the programs were stable. The repository also has plenty of choice available. It is split into 3 sections: free, non-free, and tainted. The latter is for material patented in the USA, and it is not enabled by default. But why should the rest of the world care about US law? Enabling it is not obvious: the option in the Control Centre is "Configure Media"!

None of my media files played and the software installer was of no use: I was only able to install the gstreamer plugins from the command line. Even then, only mp3 was enabled. One could probably get Mandriva versions from easyurpmi, but that would have to be set up manually. It is difficult to recommend any distro that has no obvious way of playing an mp4 video!

Otherwise, this is a good effort. I was very impressed that it will install and set up Dansguardian, a task that can be a nightmare. If you particularly need a distro where you can protect children without endless struggles in the CLI, then Mageia and Doudou seem the only choices. Otherwise, those who like Mandriva would be better off ignoring this fork.

I installed Mageia 1.0 this summer on vacation. At first I couldn't get skype to work, and I also needed a photo resizer that Dolphin didn't seem to have.

I was wrong on both counts! Skype works fine, just go to the site and install the "static" version. And for working photos nicely, get "Kim" from the KDE website, which works wonderfully!!

Mageia is my current OS on my business laptop, and I'm thrilled with it. I think I'll be sticking with this one for a good while. I've tried Xubuntu, DreamLinux, Swift Linux, PCLOS... but Mageia is really a nice platform.

Good work guys!

Brian

When Ubuntu went towards their own desk top environment, unity
I started taking a closer look at the entire organization
as a result of the pissing contest between Mark Shuttleworth & Gnome
I started shopping for a new community run distro

Mageia certainly has all the user friendly bits, though finding them can be tricky. As with any linux distro the greybeards on the user forum will tend to default to terminal based solutions. The further degradation of Mandriva has further strengthened community.
The decision to postpone the release of version 2, shows a certain maturity of leadership

I've been running Mageia 1 for over a year

YAUR [yet another ubuntu refugee]