Mageia 8

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Just installed Mageia 8 and it was an excellent experience. It continues to use the same tools used with most Mandriva based distros even though it has gone more independent over time. It still has the control center and uses RPMdrake for its package manager. The welcome screen/center is excellent and does an amazing job of guiding the user thru the setup after install.
Codecs arent auto installed so youll have to enable the tainted repos to get them but the welcome center helps you with that. It also has quite a few apps you can install first off to get you started before you need to go to installing software from RPMdrake. The tab for that is right in the desktop menu and they go out of their way to make things easy. The software installed isnt bad as Firefox, LibreOffice,Clementine,VLC and k3b are all their. You have the option at install of not installing the additional hardware support, but for most users I think its a good idea. Epson, Canon and HP printers are supported right off the bat. The install also asks of you want to setup your internet connection which is great for wifi. It tests it and lets you know so you can use an alternative if necessary. It detected my ethernet and wifi with no issues.
Printer was seen and no other hardware issues. I added Chromium,Thunderbird,Hardinfo,Bleachbit,Qbittorrent,Audacious and additional mageia themes.
Im using the KDE version which is 5.20.4 with the 5.10 kernel. The menu is the cascading style and the panel is the classic KDE style with few changes sdeping on the Plasma theme you use. In my case Im using Breeaze Dark with Oxygen. If you want to install more minimally dont install the added hardware and localization support. Iso was 3.4gb which surprised me but they do have some added software for mainstream users that many more advanced users might not want.
The speed is excellent even with the live media and resource usage is in the 480-500mb range. I installed on my Dell 6440 laptop and had no issues with compatibility but they do offer advanced options as well as non-free Nvidia drivers if you need them.
Initial gaming and multimedia tests were all fine and I have to say Im enjoying using it quite a bit. Having been a former Mandriva user its fun to be back using an RPM distro of this type.
Based on my first experience I would reccomend this distro to anyone and it can also be had with Gnome and XFCE from live media. They also have a much larger download that includes many more DE's if youre interested.

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Only issue so far is, for some reason Mageia 8 doesnt auto detect printers on wifi. system-config-printer is installed along with printer drivers but still nothing. Debian/Q4OS, Mint, and Zorin all auto detect with no issue. Q4OS though doesnt have system-config-printer installed by default, but once installed it works fine.

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I tried Open Mandriva last night to compare and its a mess compared to Mageia 8. Open Mandriva, ROSA, and Fedora really arent fun to use and in some cases like ROSA arent being maintained well. If you want to go RPM you dont have many choices, Mageia,PCLinuxOS,Gecko,and Open SUSE are really the only user friendly ones. For me right now Mageia and PCLinuxOS are the two best mainstream RPM based distros.