Mageia is a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, distributed as

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

. It was forked from the

Mandriva Linux Mandriva Linux, a fusion of the French distribution Mandrake Linux and the Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux, is a discontinued Linux distribution developed by Mandriva S.A. Each release lifetime was 18 months for base updates (Linux, syste ...

distribution. The Greek term () means enchantment, fascination, glamour, wizardry. The first release of the software distribution, Mageia 1, took place in June 2011.

History

Mageia was created in 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux, by a group of former employees of Mandriva S.A. and several other members of the Mandriva community. On September 2, 2010, Edge IT, one of the subsidiaries of Mandriva, was placed under

liquidation Liquidation is the process in accounting by which a Company (law), company is brought to an end. The assets and property of the business are redistributed. When a firm has been liquidated, it is sometimes referred to as :wikt:wind up#Noun, w ...

process by the Tribunal de commerce in Paris; effective September 17, all assets were liquidated and employees were let go. The next day, on September 18, 2010, some of these former employees, who were mostly responsible for the development and maintenance of the Mandriva Linux distribution, and several community members announced the creation of Mageia, with the support of many members of the community of developers, users and employees of Mandriva Linux.

Desktop environments

Mageia can use all major desktop environments. As was the case with Mandrake and Mandriva Linux,

KDE Plasma KDE Plasma is a Shell (computing), graphical shell developed by the KDE community for Unix-like operating systems. It serves as the interface layer between the user and the operating system, providing a graphical user interface (GUI) and workspa ...

is the main and the most used environment. End-users can choose from Plasma and GNOME 64-bit live DVD editions,

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

and 64-bit

Xfce Xfce or XFCE (pronounced as four individual letters, ) is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Xfce aims to be fast and Lightweight software, lightweight whil ...

live DVD editions, and any environment in the full DVD installation edition. It uses Mageia Control Center. LXDE,

LXQt LXQt is a free and open-source software, free and open source lightweight desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. Like its GTK predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own window manager ...

, Cinammon, MATE and Enlightenment are also available.

Application repository

Mageia offers a very large repository of software, such as productivity applications and a large variety of games. It was the first Linux distribution in which

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported Fork (software development), fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Developm ...

replaced

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

Development

Mageia was originally planned to be released on a nine-month release cycle, with each release to be supported for 18 months. Actual practice has been to release a new version when the Mageia development community feels the new release is ready from quality and stability viewpoints. The latest stable version is Mageia 9, released on 27 August 2023.

Version history

References

External links

*
Official wiki
* {{Linux distributions Linux distributions offering KDE desktop environment Mandriva Linux RPM-based Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions Independent Linux distributions 2011 software