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Review: Mageia 10
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
When Mageia 10 first launched, at the end of June, I read through the release notes and didn't find much about which to be excited. The 32-bit support was changing, shifting requirements from i586 to i686 processors. There were some small tweaks and package updates, but nothing really new to explore. This has been fairly consistent with Mageia (and OpenMandriva) for the past decade. Desktops and applications receive minor updates, but it is rare anything exciting comes along to make Mageia appeal to new users. That week I looked over the release notes, decided there wasn't anything appealing to cover for the purposes of a review and moved on to something else.
For the next two weeks I was mostly working with rapidly moving technologies - rolling releases, alternative options, and more upgrades than I could count. I ran into sound issues, broken dependencies, and containers on immutable distributions which wouldn't shutdown/restart properly. Suddenly, a "boring" release from Mageia seemed much more appealing and I downloaded the edition I thought would be the least "exciting": Xfce.
Mageia provided what I wanted. It recognized my hardware, the distribution has small, stable updates, it let me work with minimal distractions, and Mageia didn't rely on portable packages or containers for basic functionality. I had a week free from LLM-tools, audio issues, container management errors, and Wayland glitches.
I'm not saying Mageia is perfect, or even always perfect for me, but it was a soothing balm after a few weeks of modern complexities, bugs, and abstractions. Mageia manages to be easy to use without getting in the way, provides most common open source software in its repositories, and has a fantastic control centre. The performance was excellent during my trial, while using Xfce, and there were no serious problems.
I think the system installer, at least the partitioning screen, could be updated to make the manual options clearer and I was puzzled by the inconsistencies in which manual pages were installed. Otherwise Mageia 10 provided a very nice experience.