Mageia

Mageia is a Linux distribution developed by a global community and designed to be a stable, user-friendly operating system. It originated in 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux, created by Mageia.Org, a nonprofit organization formed by volunteers after Mandriva’s corporate restructuring. Mageia emphasizes community governance and aims to provide a fully open-source platform for desktop and server use.

The distribution uses the RPM Package Manager with a front-end for ease of software management and maintains official repositories with a wide range of applications. The Mageia Control Center (MCC) provides centralized configuration tools for hardware, software installation, services, and system management. The project also offers tools for software updates and localization, focusing on a coherent and accessible user experience.

Desktop environments are a prominent feature of Mageia. The project traditionally used KDE Plasma as the default desktop, and it also provides official images and repositories for other environments, including GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, and MATE. Mageia supports live and installation media, enabling users to try the system before installing and to customize the setup to their preferences.

Release model and community ecosystem are central to Mageia. It follows a versioned release cycle with ongoing security and maintenance updates through its repositories. The project emphasizes stability and long-term support for its releases, with ongoing contributions from volunteers around the world in areas such as translation, documentation, and package maintenance.