Mageia 9
Nate Drake visits the spiritual successor to Mandriva Linux and comes away enchanted.
IN BRIEF
Mageia is derived from the Greek word for magic and it’s easy to see why: installation media for every taste, plus a revamped setup wizard. The Control Center also makes configuration easy.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz
Mem: 512GB (2GB recommended)
HDD: 20GB
Builds: i586, x86_64
In 2010, the company that owned the assets to the popular and easy-to-use Linux distro Mandriva was liquidated. Shortly afterwards, a number of former Mandriva employees and volunteers from the Linux community announced the creation of Mageia. Unlike Mandriva, this OS is backed by a non-profit organisation based in France (Mageia.org). The project snowballed and to date hundreds of developers have collaborated to produce nine stable versions of the OS every one to two years.