Mageia 7 released

[crosscourt]

More here, https://distrowatch.com/10599

[crosscourt]

Ill be downloading this and Ill report back.

[crosscourt]

Im typing on the live dvd session and its very nice. Typical Mageia cascade menu with the usual interesting positions for apps within that menu. No issues with hardware including printer and wifi(Dell E6420 on edock). The iso was a bit large at 2.8gb and their are a fair amount of Kapps in this one. Very recent kernel 5.1.14 and 5.15.4 KDE. System is quick and very smooth even though Im on a live session. Still has the Mageia welcome screen and control center but they swtiched to dnf and so far I dont see the typical repo choices that were there before to choose from as its been greatly simplified. No issues at boot as it gave me the choice on my monitor not my laptop only, to use external screen. This is an issue Ive had with many distros to just get it up and running, sometimes not working at all.

So far I like what I see and it works with my Laptop/edock so Ill try installing it first chance I get.

[crosscourt]

Theyve got a wide choice of DE's with live dvds as well as classic installs. The classic install iso is over 4gb but offers you quite a few DE's.
Lets see if it can install as OpenMandriva would not install(erase and install) on a drive that already had another OS. I had to use an empty drive to get it to work.

[crosscourt]

Just installed it and it went well with a few minor glitches. Install process is far simpler than OpenMandriva and went well. Still had a few issues with getting Mageia to see my external moitor but that worked out. First boot though there was an issue with the GUI so rebooted and finally the main desktop came out and was fine. Uswed Mageia welcome center to install needed codecs and a few apps but most of that I did with their update feature. Printer was not seen nor installed automatically but installing it thru the control center was easy and quick. I like the Mageia control center and its easy for beginners to use as well. After adding some apps, Thunderbird, Gkrellm and Chromium icons didnt show till I rebooted, very odd.
Changed to Breeze Dark theme which maintained many of the Mageia elements. Resource usage is around 500mbs presently but lets see where that goes after Ive been running awhile.
I havent tested multimedia nor online yet but will report back. I give them kudos though as the initial live session they showed the screen to switch to external monitor on the external monitor screen, unlike many other distros that make you open up your laptop to do it. No issues with my Dell E6420, edock or backlit keyboard. Uses 5.1.14 kernel but no issues so far. I did have some issue until I updated the bios from A05 to A25.
Wifi works fine and overall its a great experience but its a very new distro so be patient with some of the smaller glitches.

[crosscourt]

Videos, youitube, and other multimedia seem to work fine and no sound issues as well. Resource usage has settled down to 455mbs at GUI.

The last two boots were a bit odd as one time it took longer to boot with an added boot screen and the second time it bypassed that screen and went to login quicker and booted to GUI much faster. Not sure whats going on as there were no updates amd ROSA for instance never does this.

[crosscourt]

Very stable,easy to use, a evolutionary jump thats more polished and a bit quicker. If youre looking for a n easy to use distro that sticks to a proven design its the best version of Mageia Ive used.

[crosscourt]

Much better than either PCLinuxOS or OpenMandriva but I still give the edge to ROSA for the time being. Beginners will find Mageia 7 easy to use and the control center really helps newbies with some aspects of the system.

[crosscourt]

Updating comes much quicker than it use to with Mageia 6. Impressed with how well supported its been early on but lets see what happens long term.

[crosscourt]

After the Nvidia driver issue was solved Ive been using Mageia 7 exclusively so far and really enjoying it. Its a very different experience from Mageia 6, at least in my case and its far more up to date than Rosa R11. ROSA I had to stop using as there were some issues with apps not staying current.