**WARNING: MAJOR GEEK ALERT**
I’m hoping some of the folks out on WordPress might be able to help me with a suggestion. I’m looking to move to a new Linux distribution.
I have been using the Mandriva distribution for a number years since it was called Mandrake and it was in version 8.0. Recently, I have been happily using Mandriva 2011.0 (“Hydrogen”). I just discovered that the home user version of Mandriva (Mandriva Powerpack 20xx) is no longer being supported or updated (my update manager is no longer receiving updates) as it has reached its end of life. In addition, Mandriva has taken the decision to focus on their corporate products and are no longer producing a home version.
I have determined that there are a couple forks that have started since the decision was made by Mandriva SA:
- Open Mandriva, which just got started earlier this year,
- Mageia, which started in September 2010 and has had two major releases.
Now that you have the background, I have a few questions that I’m hoping to have answered:
- Does anyone have an opinion of either Open Mandriva or Mageia? Would it make sense to move to one of these distributions seeing as they are forks of a distribution I am very familiar with?
- If I wanted to try a new distribution what is the recommendation of this group? I would like a distribution that will be the least troublesome (e.g. stable) and will support the most peripherals. I use Chrome as my browser so I don’t expect too much issue there. I’m a hobby coder so having access to a decent set of IDEs would be nice, especially ones supporting Python. I currently use Dr. Python as I like the interface and I’m really just trying to practise things I’m learning in Python currently. Having an IDE that would support other programming languages would be nice too. I’m used to using a “Package Manager” to both update my system and add new applications so I would prefer to use a distribution that provides this feature
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. I know the discussion can get quite heated when it comes to favoured distributions. I hoping that the suggestions put forward will take into account my few requirements.
The Emporium of Lost Thoughts 
Hey Brad
Remember a couple of weeks ago you asked this (topic) on G+ and I replied Mageia? Well the stable 3 version is out now and I will replace Ubuntu raring on my laptop with it. Let you know how it goes in a couple of days.
I saw the announcement! I’m going to find a bit of time to download the ISO and do a clean install on my Thinkpad R60 over the Mandriva 2011.0 distro I have now.
Please let me know how your install goes. I would very interested in learning of your experience.
Hey again Brad,
I installed Mageia 3 from the “dualarch” iso. I did a small review on my WP blog. See it at 01mickoDOTcomSLASHblog (Sub DOT for . and SLASH for /).
You are probably better off with the DVD version though.
Cheers!
Thanks for posting the review. I have bittorrented the ISO for the DVD version (~3.7 GB) and now have to burn it to a DVD. I’ll need to find some time to do that and to do the install.
[…] finally got my Linux distribution upgraded. After mulling over the options, I opted to install Mageia 3. It has been a good experience so far. KDE 4.10.2 continues to work […]