I am somewhat curious of Magia and its heritage. I've always wanted to use it but I have been somewhat wary of it as its system is soooo far different than what I am used to. In the next few days I will be setting up a dual boot again in an attempt for stability and I want a somewhat LTS system thats outside the small bubble of slackware/arch/ubuntu that I am so used to.
I have had a few issues with it. Installing Mageia 5 on a laptop, I found that I couldn't install anything off the repo's. Nor could I have it check for update. In fact the system doesn't seem like its all too far set to use wifi and more geared towards ETH0 than anything else. Past that, it uses KDE3.5. Is there anything out to say that it will use plasma any time soon?
Is there some stuff that is really basic that I am missing? Also why do I have to do SU to do anything cli wise not related to basic user apps? Why not use sudo?
it should show who is and isn't sudo. if this file doesn't exist, you maybe have to install 'sudo'. no idea what Mageia uses (yum/dnf, apt-get, pacman etc) but as root
(yum/dnf/apt-get/pacman/etc) install sudo
then sudo is installed and you can edit the /etc/sudoers file to get the good 'ol sudo going.
I used to use Mageia, but then they got behind on development a bit. I should probably check them out again. The big feature of mandrake was of course the pseudo-graphical settings and config manager in terminal, but OpenSuSE has that also, plus OpenSuSE has snapper of course, which is a bitch to set up on other distros (a bit of an overstatement, it's not that hard, but it's kinda annoying). Rosa has a better welcome screen than Mageia for about the same base. I'm struggling a bit to find an elevator pitch for Mageia these days lol.
If you want to run something sort of similar, as in something with its origins in Mandrake have a look at PCLinuxOS.
It's very different from most other distros. The lead developer is a guy that goes by the name Texstar. In the dim and distant past he was responsible for a spin of Mandrake, maybe not a spin but an additional repo for Mandrake. One with codecs and drivers and such, you know the stuff you need to make desktop Linux useable back in the early 2000's. Anyhow because of reasons, PCLinuxOS was born and it's still going strong. A rolling release that is neither cutting edge or out of date. Texstar is a man of strongly held opinions about how a distro should be. There is definitely a PCLinuxOS "Way". So there is no systemd in PCLinuxOS it's only just moved from kde 4 to kde 5 so in that regard, it's very conservative. That said I'm on the 4.10 kernel, latest Nvidia drivers so it's not like it's outdated. All of my software is up to date, looking at version numbers in the repo nothing stands out as being old. If it is you just post on the forum and someone will get to it and an update pushing the new version will appear in short order. The old tagline for the distro was "The distro hopper stopper" and that is how I found the distro many years ago. Bouncing from distro to distro and finding my home on PCLinuxOS. I was running Ubuntu-Mate for a while but the direction Canonical has gone in I don't feel so happy with. Remembering my time with PCLinuxOS fondly I recently returned. It's a bit like coming home to a familiar pair of old slippers. They never appear to be mentioned on tech sites or podcasts. I'm sure many Linux users know little to nothing about the distro.
Anyhow, I've rambled on long enough, PCLinuxOS, it's there for your consideration. If Mageia does not work out for you there is a distro with a similar heritage with an active community waiting for you. Give it a go, kick the tyres and see if it meets your needs.
note: If Mageia is anything like PCLinuxOS and I think it is, they really do not like sudo. Read more here link (remember that just because someone has a different opinion doesn't mean they are wrong or stupid they are coming from a different place and have different experiences)
Yea PCLinuxOS manages to be conservative and up to date at the same time. What can I say Texstar is a Texan and as such he has a particular way of doing things. Very hospitable but wipe your feet before going in his house, and PCLinuxOS is quite definitely his house.
To credit, I have it in a VM. I just haven't had time lately to really burn into it. I decided that what I needed was an LTS distro, kernel 4.10, at minimum, high availability to GPU drivers, an easy build system, and XFCE. So, I did my catch all, said fuck off to the build system, and got xubuntu. Because it used to be my system and it literally boots in 2 seconds flat. Like, its amazing. I also dual boot to cover windows because I frankly cannot be bothered to do anything with KVM as I have no spare time.
And to be honest, thats probably the reason I'm not in PCLOS right now: time. I don't have time to get the package manager figured out, how the repos work, where everything is. I needed, need, familiarity. So I went to literally the most familiar thing I know of.
If I can find a machine to throw it on I'll play with it more permanently there, otherwise its kinda eh. I'll fiddle with the VM but I've had other amounts of what the fuck happen recently like.... oh I dunno, discord won't let me log into my account, for instance. Among other things.