
Mageia 6 has been released - Conan_Kudo
https://blog.mageia.org/en/2017/07/16/announcing-mageia-6/
======
mpol
In case anyone wonders, why still Mageia (the old Mandrake/Mandriva)?

There are still things in this distro, that others haven't picked up that well
on.

The Mageia Control Center can do basically anything you would want. It can
detect printers and find the right driver and setup for you.

There is Draknet, that just works for me. I despise Network Manager and WICD,
they have horrible UX in my opinion. I hear good things about the netctl in
Arch Linux, bet that is specific to that distro aa far as I am aware.

In my experience it is an RPM-based distro that is well executed. I tried
Fedora around version 14 till 16, but just gave up for a lot of reasons. They
say it is really good now, but they said it back then too. I haven't tried
SuSe in years, but I never liked Yast.

Well, in the end it all comes down to personal preference I suppose. I always
loved Mandrake/Mandriva. I tried Fedora for 2 years. Tried Debian for 3 years
even. But I am happy to be using Mageia again on my desktop/server and laptop.

~~~
jadbox
If Mageia Control Center is so much better than KDE's, why hasn't it been
adopted into Plasma? All these new distros seem like they are fracturing the
community more than helping the greater ecosystem, but tbh I haven't looked
too far into this distro/community.

~~~
mpol
You will have to ask the Plasma people :) One reason might be that it is
written in Perl - GTK.

Mageia Control goes way back to probably 1999. I don't understand why other
distro's haven't picked it up. Most distro's have nothing in this regard, just
an installer and the DE control center. I assume it is politics or NIH, but I
honestly don't know or understand.

~~~
Conan_Kudo
There's an ongoing effort to rework MCC into something more flexible, called
ManaTools. Unlike MCC, ManaTools offers Qt 5, GTK+ 3, and ncurses UIs through
the usage of the libyui library.

There's a preview release of it in Mageia 6 as "manatools".

In addition, development of the new tools is on GitHub:
[https://github.com/manatools](https://github.com/manatools)

------
fnj
So the day of its release, all the pieces are already obsolete. linux 4.9.35,
should be 4.12 systemd 230, should be 233.75 Qt5.6.2, should be 5.10.3 firefox
52.2.0, should be 54.0.1

I guess I'm spoiled by Arch.

------
Frondo
yay! This is the only linux distribution I've ever used where everything "Just
works". Made my computer totally stable, to the point where I lost basically
all of my linux-configurin' knowhow.

If you want to try a Linux that needs no care and attention, I would suggest
you try this one.

------
gradschool
How well does it support full disk encryption? I poked around on the site and
didn't see anything obvious about in the installation instructions. Is it any
easier for multimedia stuff like exchanging music and videos with phones and
cameras than figuring out everything the hard way with Debian?

~~~
Conan_Kudo
I don't know about full-disk encryption, as I don't use that feature.

However, for multimedia, it has everything in the main repositories. For stuff
that may be encumbered in some way, they are shipped in the "tainted"
repository, which can be activated separately.

Likewise for nonfree software/firmware.

------
digi_owl
Used to keep an eye on Mandrake back in the day, and i liked the installer.
But these days i really do not need the systemd headache.

------
reitanqild
Mandrake/Mandriva used to be my favourites until early Ubuntus.

Haven’t tried Mageia lately.

~~~
gnuvince
Mini story: I got interested by Linux around 1999 when I was 15-16. I tried to
install Slackware 3.4 and Red Hat 5.0 on my machine at home, but I did not
know enough about computers and I did not understand English well enough to
follow the instructions that came with those distros. I managed to get Linux
installed and start XFree86, but I had no idea how to connect to the Internet
or how to do anything really.

A few months later, I bought a copy of "Linux France" (or maybe it was another
magazine?) that came with a CD of Mandrake 6.1. Thanks to the French
instructions in the magazine, I was able to install Mandrake without issues
and they gave instructions on how to use kppp to connect to the Internet.
Since kppp looked similar to the modem connection utility from Windows 95/98,
I felt comfortable and for the first time, I was able to go on the Internet
with Linux! (Also, I believe that it detected my winmodem, which was probably
the main problem I had with Slackware and Red Hat.)

From then on, I basically never looked back: I learned how to operate a Linux
machine, I learned English, I learned to program, and 18 years later, though I
haven't used Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia in years, I am still very thankful that
it existed when it did and opened up a whole new world to me. I hope that this
release of Mageia can do the same for another 15-16 year-old who's interested
in computers, wants to run Linux, but feels intimidated.

~~~
woodandsteel
Mandrake was my first linux, back in the day. I found it easy to install and
use. I'm on mint nowadays, but I really should take a look a mageia.

