I started writing this review back at the beginning of July. Well, it’s the last night in Sydney for a year and I still haven’t written it. So I’m going to give you the gist of it very quickly.
I migrated off Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 release back on the 23rd of June.
It wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with Mandriva in anyway. I was very content with my installation and have been for a while. However the new fork based on Mandriva was out and I thought I should give it a try, especially since it has the majority of the former Mandriva contributor community onboard. Another reason is because Mandriva 2011 is still not released, and they have been mucking about with the UI apparently.
Despite a clear migration path from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 being officially supported, the exercise did not go well. Here are my problems documented. Basically X and Dbus issues caused by a change in the default user UID, according to the forum. I had already solved the problem with a fresh install of Mageia on top of my Linux partition.
So the conclusion after restoring my files from backup on a fresh Mageia install is that it is quite nice. There are some nice touches in terms of the audio just working without configuration, and other little bits and bobs. But overall I have had a little more trouble with it in terms of stability than the old Mandriva release. Which makes me sort of want to return that distro once 2011 is released for a test drive.
It’s still a great distro, but it just feels less solid somehow than its predecessor. There’s a bump up in smoothness and speed but that shouldn’t come at the cost of stability. This is a more thorough review of the release. Basically it’s early days, and the first release is solid rather than great.