What is the crowd's opinion of Mageia?

From 3.5 billion comments

I'd say Mageia is slightly easier than Ubuntu. It even offers a "Control Panel"-like configuration utility if you're uncomfortable with editing config files.

It also has one of the most solid KDE implementations, on par with OpenSuse, if not even better.

quote from http://www.mageia.org/en/about/2010-sept-announcement.html :

Paris, September 18th 2010

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

Forking Mandriva Linux? Yes. Forking an existing open source project is never an easy decision to make, and forking Mandriva Linux is a huge task.

It was not an impulsive decision. We all spoke a lot before: former employees, Cooker contributors and users' communities. We collected opinions and reactions in the past weeks as we needed to get some kind of global agreement and to gather, before going ahead.

We believe a fork is the best solution and we have decided to create a new distribution: Mageia.