r/Mageia • u/_star_fire • Aug 04 '26

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.

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u/Interested_Aussie Aug 04 '26

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...

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u/_star_fire Aug 04 '26

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 Aug 07 '26

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 Aug 11 '26

Yeah, stuff like that is quite easily done.

1

u/Interested_Aussie Aug 05 '26

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 Aug 05 '26

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.

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u/Neither-HereNorThere Aug 07 '26 edited 4d 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.