Oh No, Mageia has Lost its Magic

In this morning's Distrowatch Weekly Jesse Smith reviews Mageia 4 and says he was disappointed in it. Several comments agreed with him too. In other news today the Linux Journal celebrates 20 years, Xfce beats KDE and GNOME, and lots more.

Magiea has been one of my favorite projects and distributions since its inception, but Jesse Smith said today that the spell is broken for him. Smith had issues with his network connection upon first boot, but continued to have installation and updating of software issues. He complained of poor performance, missing packages, and a seriously annoying task switcher too. All in all, he wasn't pleased. He concluded (in part):

I was disappointed by this release. It may be telling that this past week marked one of the few occasions I have run checksums on a distribution's installation media multiple times, suspecting corruption. I have long been a fan of Mandriva and its family of distributions, such as Mageia, and this latest version just did not feel like it was ready for release. Most of the time it barely felt like it was ready for beta testing. It felt as though one thing after another went wrong.

Linux Journal is one of oldest magazines for Linux enthusiasts out there and actually celebrating 20 years in their March issue. They said, "We're excited for our 20th year! And to celebrate, we figured we'd give you a month of Linux-related information, up-to-date news, fun articles and boat loads of tips. It's been our thing for 20 years, and it seemed like a silly time to stop!" For this issue, they have one of the writers from the very first issue back to discuss how Linux has changed since, so check that out.

Matt Hartley published a piece today telling readers "Why XFCE beats KDE and GNOME." He said, "I've found that XFCE offers more robustness than say, LXDE, which lacks much of XFCE's polish in its default configuration. XFCE provides all the benefits one may have enjoyed in GNOME 2, but with a lightweight experience that makes it a hit on older computers." He compares his experience using Xfce to KDE and GNOME in several key areas and concludes, "I feel that XFCE provides a better user experience for someone looking for a traditional, stable and simple to understand desktop environment."

Bonus links today are Making better use of the find command, Debian Project News - March 3rd, and Linux Mint Debian 201403 released!