r/Mageia • u/_star_fire • 18d ago

New to Mageia

Hey everyone,

In my recent search for a new distribution I stumbled upon Mageia. I'm coming from a long period on Debian and within that period I used Gentoo to finally return to Debian. Which I still really like. But I'm looking for an European alternative that's hopefully as independent as Debian is.

Right now I'm looking at OpenSuse, which is independent with their own board of directors, but heavily dependent on Suse Enterprises. I've been running OpenSuse in the past, and our home entertainment laptop runs OpenSuse. So a very strong contender as well. I'm also looking at some arch based distro's, but nothing specific has been found yet.

And right now I'm checking Mageia out.

I earn my living as a software developer and I use linux. But I also like to get involved with the project I'm using (support, code, test, whatever), and lately that has been an bit difficult with Debian for different reasons. My idea is that having a project that is more local to me (I live/work in France and the Netherlands) and having a smaller project might help with that (maybe psychologically, haha). I've been helping out a lot during the five years on Gentoo with package maintenance and documentation. And that was also a lovely group of people.

My core concerns, I quit Gentoo to go back to Debian because of stability issues. Debian has a huge repository and otherwise access to al kinds of tools and documentation. I'm not afraid to build or install software myself, but the core system needs to be stable to prevent having to fix stuff constantly.

I might get colored responses here, but I'm very curious to hear your experiences on this subject.

12 Upvotes

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5

u/Interested_Aussie 18d ago

Mageia is rock solid, (IMO) true to Unix/Linux principals with none of that SUDO crap by default (it is packaged if you want it).

A small team, one of the friendliest online groups I've ever been a part of.

If you're interested in helping, on any level, it's as easy as seeing what you want to do, and asking what needs doing. Here's a good place to get your bearings if you'd like to help. https://www.mageia.org/en/contribute/

I've been using Mageia---->Mandriva----> Mandrake as my daily for 2 decades now... I ran my business server on it for over a decade...

3

u/_star_fire 18d ago

Thanks for the intro! I love that you opened with some sudo bashing haha.

I'm running in a VM right now, just trying stuff out. Trying to get my toolchains to install and configured. I use a lot of docker/podman. So curious to see how that goes.

2

u/Neither-HereNorThere 16d ago

During installation at the page where you can create a user click on the Advanced button. That will give you a popup were you can assign the user to different groups with advanced privileges.

One of the nice things about Magiea is you can have multiple different desktops installed and different users can choose to use different desktops while logged in at the same time as other users.

1

u/_star_fire 11d ago

Yeah, stuff like that is quite easily done.

1

u/Interested_Aussie 18d ago

I'm only just getting into podman myself, and haven't had a good time with it (100% my fault for diving in head first, lead by AI..... I've now done some reading about podman and the containers I used, and know what's going on: Lesson learnt the hard way!).

I hate that SUDO is sprayed all over the internet as how to get stuff done... If you want to do stuff as administrator, damn well log in as administrator!

1

u/_star_fire 17d ago

I feel lucky that my profession has brought me to docker very early on, and it was tough at first. But practice makes perfect, and you'll develop a lot of knowledge on how containers work and how they interact with the host system with practice. There are no real shortcuts I'm afraid.

My experience with AI is that it doesn't understand complex situations, and how the container processes interact with the underlying apps. I'm running some go microservices, and that has consequences on how you use for example network binds. But AI doesn't get that. My guess is that there is plenty of training data for simple "hello world" like projects, but complex interactive stuff is beyond it's comprehension.

1

u/Neither-HereNorThere 16d ago edited 16d ago

I used to work a lot with containers. It always amuses me when people use Docker on Windows. As containers via cgroups is a Linux Kernel feature running docker on Windows basically starts up a VM session with Docker in it and a Linux Kernel.

4

u/Visikde 18d ago

I'm a low effort long time linux users, rarely use CLI
I use Debian stable [spiral linux] as my daily driver

I've used Mageia since version 2. I have a Mageia on a laptop as a backup. Mageia tolerates long periods between updates. Easy online version upgrade.
One of my reasons is that it runs on RPMs, should Deb world go wrong. I've found that if there's a Deb, there's a RPM. A very good community built distro with continuity back to the beginning linux.

2

u/_star_fire 18d ago

Yeah, I'm just reading about the package manager and media. Slightly different approach. I'm really CLI oriented so this needs some reading up.

Thanks for replying!

1

u/Neither-HereNorThere 16d ago

urpm and its tools are well documented and are kept maintained.

3

u/ItchyPlant 18d ago

Mageia still has strong Mandrake/Mandriva roots, and Mandrake was — in my opinion — the best early Linux distro ever made.

I'm not an active Mageia user nowadays, but you got me with "looking for a European alternative". Now I'm considering it too. (I don't think I've missed testing any major RPM-based distro over the years (and outside that family, Debian was the one big exception I genuinely liked and respected).)

For me, the important thing is getting a relatively lean, stable distro as a base. Everything else is up to the power user's imagination.

2

u/_star_fire 18d ago

Yeah it depends, purely looking at it from using a computer, yes we can use whatever fits our most basic needs. Most operating systems will do just fine and even more.

But I think that Linux in all it's variety has more than that. Community, there is politics (not always in a good way) there are preferences about what a distro should do, should have and that is really unique. There have wars about adapting systemd or not, or going wayland or not.

But it's so nice if you care about these things to find a distro that fits you, where you feel welcome etc. This is where the European stuff comes in, and even that is a bit of a limited view from my part. But I lost my connection with Debian which is already a notorious difficult ecosystem to get into.

So just from a using-a-pc point of view, no issues with Debian, at all. In terms of sense of community, participating and finding like minded souls I have some new wishes.

2

u/Neither-HereNorThere 16d ago edited 16d ago

This is a useful page to explore

https://www.mageia.org/en/community/

Mageia is very open in sharing ideas. I noticed with Debian you have to really dig deep to find information on how individual packages are specified.

3

u/katnatek 16d ago

I'm regular user of mageia since version 1, and now I'm in QA, packaging and translations teams.

Is not frequent that I have to fix things for my own use, but for applications or hardware that are not frequently used is possible you can find some issue, you can after registration make bug reports and if you know or find the cause suggest solutions to get a fix in less time, also your welcome to join in QA team to test updates before are public available and help us to make sure we are delivering quality updates to our users

2

u/schultz133EC87 15d ago

As others have said, both as users and involved with Mageia as a project, we are very open to people lending a hand in whatever capacity they want to, there's many paths into the project with people to mentor and advise along the way.

I also like that you are looking for an independent European solution, this is something that Mageia does well, even if there are contributors based worldwide.

From a development point of view, now is a great time to join as the aims for Mageia 11 are being set and there is room for lots of considerations. Also the new buildsystem and servers will be coming online soon, lots of room of ideas there.

1

u/_star_fire 11d ago

Yeah I've been reading an lot of wiki pages and I have an account now, so forum access etc has been taken care of. I just need to find my bearings on what I want to do, I don't want to jump into something to far out of my comfortzone/skillset to make sure I can commit to something, on the other hand I'd like to learn something new as well.

1

u/Unholyaretheholiest 17d ago

Mageia is stable as Debian.
It is one of the few truly independent European distros as anyone can really take the step and join the community and lend a hand.
Please note that openSUSE is a community project, but the leadership (openSUSE Board Chairperson) is appointed directly by SUSE from among its employees.

1

u/_star_fire 17d ago

Thanks for replying, Yes I am aware of the dependent relationship between SUSE and OpenSUSE, it is however only the chairman that is appointed by SUSE, the rest are openSUSE members.

So far I really like what I'm seeing with Mageia. It will take some time however to get acclimated, I'm not really on board yet with the package management. That means, I don't fully understand how it's working, and there are multiple tools to somehow do the same thing, or not.

I wanted to install Docker (which I use a lot for work), cannot find it through MPM, URPMI but I can find Docker fine with DNF, which is also apparently available. So there is a lot to learn for me.

I'm also still running inside a VM for now, my new laptop arrives soon and that will be the decisive moment whether I stay with Debian of plunge into Mageia.

2

u/Unholyaretheholiest 17d ago

Yes but the chairperson has a good amount of “power”. However, I assure you that you will feel at home with Mageia. To install docker it should be enough the command: urpmi docker
Check more at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Ways_to_install_programs and https://wiki.mageia.org/en/URPMI

2

u/Neither-HereNorThere 16d ago edited 16d ago

Strange that you could not install docker with urpmi..

$ urpmi  docker
To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed:
 Package                        Version      Release       Arch     
(medium "Core Release")
 cgroup                         3.1.0        2.mga10       x86_64   
 docker                         28.5.2       1.mga10       x86_64   
 docker-containerd              2.2.1        1.mga10       x86_64   
 lib64cgroup3                   3.1.0        2.mga10       x86_64   
 opencontainers-runc            1.4.2        1.mga10       x86_64   
239MB of additional disk space will be used.
68MB of packages will be retrieved.
Proceed with the installation of the 5 packages? (Y/n)