Review: Mageia 9
When I first started using Mageia 9 a few weeks ago I was impressed by the distribution. Despite the fact there were a lot of download options for a user-friendly project and the somewhat technical style of the release notes, the distribution had a lot working in its favour. The live media is easy to use, the installer is unusually straight forward, and I really like the welcome window. This welcome window especially strikes a good balance between providing access to options while not being overwhelming for a newcomer.
There are other good aspects too. I like the performance and stability of the Plasma desktop. Mageia seems to have tuned things to be unusually responsive and, despite the occasional flicking, the desktop session remained reliable. I also really enjoy the Control Centre as it makes handling user accounts, services, printing, and a dozen other tasks pleasantly simple.
After the first two days of using Mageia 9 I was ready to declare the distribution one of the best desktop experiences I had enjoyed so far in 2023. However, the longer I used the distribution the more issues kept creeping into the trial. Early on it was little things like having the first-run wizard crash with cryptic debug information printing to the screen, and the installer using archaic terminology like "halt the computer", and the systemd pauses while shutting down the computer.
Later in the trial I found it weird I had to configure the IPv4 and IPv6 firewalls separately and had to dig multiple levels deep in the application menu to find launchers, sometimes even in mostly-empty categories. Needing to scroll through dozens of software repositories to find the ones required to enable media codecs was unusually cumbersome for a modern distribution. It also felt like an oversight to have the system installer (and its icon) carry over from the live media to the installed operating system. These are not serious issues, but they are some key examples of little quirks, concerns, and bits of unpolished corners of the distribution.
The big stumbling point for me was package management. Mageia's package manager is functional, it will fetch and remove RPM packages, but it's a bit awkward to use - it is not really a low level package manager and not really a modern software centre. I'm surprised Mageia shipped with it with the Plasma desktop instead of KDE's Discover which would offer a more familiar interface and offer support for Flatpak packages too. Speaking of Flatpak, I find it curious Mageia (and a few other distributions) go to the trouble of installing Flatpak support, but not enabling any repositories such as Flathub. This just adds one extra step for the user.
A bigger issue though was my copies of Mageia never received software updates. At first I thought the distribution must have fetched updates during the install process (despite my selection to skip this step). But then a few days went by and a few more. I ended up running Mageia longer than usual, around two weeks, and despite all of the security updates other projects pushed out during that time, I received nothing from Mageia - either through the graphical update manager or via the DNF command line package manager. I confirmed I had the Update repositories enabled, but no updates came through. This is a significant security concern as, if there are updates available and something is going wrong in the background of my system, the package manager is failing silently. But if there aren't updates in the repositories then the project is failing to protect its users. In either case, it gives me strong reservations about running Mageia for any length of time.