Mageia is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux by former contributors and members of Mandriva. The official announcement of the project was on September 18, 2010, and the first stable release June 1, 2011. The article is a combination review of the GNOME and KDE desktop editions.

I’m very pleased to say that Mandriva 2010 is now out! Myself and the rest of the Mandriva Developers and Contributors have put in a lot of work this time round. I’m pretty happy.

What is the the advantage of Mandriva above other distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora. I wrote down a couple of reasons why I use Mandriva on my desktop systems.

Now a few weeks after my first article about Mandriva’s future things have even more moved in a negative direction. The new management has decided to close down Edge-IT, a company which was bought by Mandriva several years ago. Apparently lots of the employees working on the distribution, were in fact Edge-IT employees and so they now have to leave the sinking ship.

Mageia has been pretty popular ever since its original release last year. While all Linux distributions give you more choice than any other operating system, Mageia was one of the few distros that has a lot of these choices upfront. This is partly due to it being an offshoot of Mandriva, however the team at Mageia have taken it noticeably further

"Dear Steve,

Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.

Mandriva always stands one step ahead of other distribution in terms of overall experience.. Though ranked #6 in Distrowatch.. Mandriva features and utilities makes it one of the best newbie friendly distro out there.. The best feature of Mandriva is that the developers try to re master the new release from the scratch.. Not only in terms of Hardware and Software..

Mageia is a new Linux distribution formed by former employees and contributors of Mandriva, a Linux software provider and publisher of a line of Linux distributions of the same name. The first stable release (of Mageia) has since been reviewed for this website (see Mageia 1 review). This article presents the steps necessary to install it on an encrypted LVM file system.

Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft. Rumors on the Web have hinted that Mandriva might be next on the list. Mandriva believes in interoperability, which must be based on open standards, like ODF. They also believe that software patent threats are just FUD. So no deal with Microsoft from Mandriva.