Mageia is the community continuation of Mandriva Linux, created as a nonprofit association when the original French company faltered, and it preserves a lineage that once introduced many Europeans to desktop Linux. The inheritance shows in its tooling: the Mageia Control Center gathers hardware setup, package management, and system configuration into one friendly hub, a hallmark of the Mandrake and Mandriva tradition. Packages are RPMs, installable through the classic urpmi tools or DNF, and the project runs its own build system and repositories. Releases are fixed rather than rolling, each maintained for a comfortable window, and installation offers KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and lighter desktops from one image. The community is famously multilingual, with strong French roots. Mageia suits users who want a traditional, integrated desktop distribution outside the biggest families. An OpenFactory VM brings that experience into your browser within minutes.
Select a version of Mageia to try online:
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Need Mageia for more than a quick browser preview?
The buttons above launch an ephemeral browser VM, perfect for kicking the tires. Paid plans unlock the things you'd actually use it for:
- ✓Persistent VMs you can SSH into and customize
- ✓Snapshots, your own packages, a downloadable ISO
- ✓Fleet deployment to your own machines (on-prem or cloud)