> > Has anybody tried out the new Mageia distro? I'm a Fedora guy, so I like > the rpm model and the easy upgrades/massive software that Fedora provides. >
Oddly enough, I just did. A little (probably unnecessary) background, so you know where I come from... I, too, have been a fan of Fedora for years. I started out compiling early slackware (0.9.7?), then picked up again with Red Hat. When Mandrake came out, I switched to that, got too busy with work to have spare Linux, then eventually came back. By that time, Fedora had both Gnome and KDE, and I flirted with both, and settled on Gnome. Lately, I've been wanting things that Fedora just isn't supplying (eclipse WDT, for example), and I don't want to have to compile the whole toolchain to try things out. I've also grown disenchanted with Gnome, its' Microsoftening, and its' bloat. A little while back, I installed XFCE, and while I was fairly happy with it, it was a bit clunky feeling. Since F15 just EOLed, I decided to scan around, and picked up Mageia. On June 5th, I installed it with as little gnome as possible, and XFCE. I found the interface pretty good, and with less Gnome, XFCE seems to fly. Unfortunately, Mageia seems a bit unpopulated. The repos are pretty slim (at least, for the tools I normally run). A friend of mine (also a Fedora guy) went through the same set of tests as I did, so I'll just quote from our email exchanges, as they were fresh in our minds... "I'm also really not a fan of Gnome Shell, and have been fidling with XFCE more. I've rebuilt my box with Mageia (nee Mandriva) and XFCE, and have to say I'm reasonably impressed. Pretty quick, with better tools than XFCE, but without many of the dependencies as Fedora (Mandriva tended to build extra tools without the Gnome libraries.) I even managed to get Compiz largely working again within just a day or two of playing. I know putting desktop effects on a slim desktop is kind of counter-productive.. but I like them =] OTOH, I'm not really impressed with the repos <G>" "And looking through the [Debian] repos; compiz is there. xfce. diffpdf. I *need* diffpdf and fslint. Others I can't seem to find in Mageia: diffuse, some other tools. Eclipse looks like it's getting dropped from the repos; but it looks like it basically is for everybody else, too (Fedora doesn't have sufficient dependencies to run the web tools), so getting it from the source is going to be the way to go, regardless. And since the Android dev kit is debian, and rooted in Eclipse, I have a higher degree of confidence there." "I'm fairly happy with Xfce, right now. Light weight, quick. Installing it without Gnome (at least in Mageia) it came with much better tools." There's more, but that's really the point at which we both booted up a Debian VM, and decided we liked it. We're both now running Debian -> XFCE4, and are both very happy with it (a week in) One of my decision factors was the range of packages in the repos. Fedora has come up slightly short of packages I need, and according to distrowatch (IIRC) Mageia has half as many. Debian has significantly more (less than Ubuntu, but I don't want to run Ubuntu). Ubuntu 37,000 Debian 29,050 Fedora 22,000 Mageia 11,409 I wasn't thrilled about leaving the RPM model, myself; but my fears have proven unfounded. apt-get seems thorough; the repos are large, and mixing them turns out to be fairly simple. Apt will even build you apps from the source repos if binaries are missing (filling in dependencies, grabbing source, and building it). Or, just if you tell it to. I currently have everything installed I wanted, at versions comparable to Fedora, and the only thing I had to compile myself was a menu-editor for XFCE (rather than load a Gnome one.) I also managed to get a pretty Gnome-free XFCE install (slimmer than anything else I've tried), which runs quick, seems far more stable than it did with Gnome floating around, and it even runs compiz without a hitch, so far. I could be wrong, but I feel that ditching some Gnome librariness has gotten out of XFCE's way. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup References can be found at: http://goo.gl/anqri Please remember to abide by our list rules (http://tinyurl.com/LUG-Rules or http://cdn.fsdev.net/List-Rules.pdf)
