Mageia Linux gets popular

Mageia Linux, the not so known distro, is now in the No. 4 spot for rankings over the past six months, behind only Mint, Ubuntu, and Fedora, claim sources.

It's not uncommon for individual distributions to shift up and down slightly on the list over time. Still, this is quite a big jump. Long time Linux fans will remember that Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux that was launched in late 2010. Whereas its beleaguered French parent is a commercially run distribution— now at No. 27 on DistroWatch— the Mageia project is community- based and non- profit. Released this May, Mageia 2 is the latest stable version of the free and open source operating system, and it offers a number of compelling features.

Most interesting, in fact, is the plethora of desktop environments Mageia users can choose from. Not only does Mageia 2 include KDE 4.8.2, GNOME 3.4.1 and Xfce 4.9 as desktop options, it packs three others as well: LXDE, E17 and the lightweight Razor-qt 0.4.1.

Mageia's look has also been updated in this second release of the software for "a smoother appearance regardless of desktop," the project team says.

Among the many power-packed applications that come along with it are the new GIMP 2.8, LibreOffice 3.5, Digikam and Showfoto 2.6 photomanagement systems, the VLC 2.0.1 media player, Amarok 2.5, Flash Player Plugin 11.2, Chromium Browser 18, and the business-oriented Extended Support Release of Firefox 10.