I’m not sure if anyone here cares. Mageia seems to be more of a niche distribution? Personally, I still find it interesting and look there from time to time. EOS was, is and will of course continue to be my daily driver 
There is no publicly confirmed release date yet, but at least a “version freeze” date has been added to the official development wiki page. (Sep 23) and so I assume that Mageia 9 will possibly be released in October or November.
As I said, just in case anyone is interested.
now that you mention, … I see OpenMandriva to be a bit more interesting, offers also a rolling version,
… same distro family …
Yes I have looked there too, however the experience with it seem to be more mixed than with Mageia from what I have read?
Have you had personal experience with OpenMandriva?
I can not actually tell about Mageia, they resist converting to a rolling
distro, so I lost interest.
I am testing OpenMandriva rolling version on one of my 5 computers,
whereby I am not a typical distro hopper, so I stay with it…
currently familiarising myself with dnf.
it seems really good so far, but I have had it for a few weeks, so no
long-term experience yet. The forum is smaller but active, so I was
getting help with some minor hiccups.
Hmm. Thank you for your input!
I guess I will take a closer look and maybe we will see each other in the Mandriva forum some day.
looking forward to it
I was following Mageia through a Linux magazine, can’t remember, perhaps Linux format. It was quite strange to me that they always ranked this distro as best one 10/10, I think even over other popular distros like Ubuntu, fedora and Arch. That was interesting, either the editor has a small crush on Mageia, or it is genuinely super great. Never tried it though.
Mageia is one of the distros I run on my laptop.
I have been using Cauldron for a while now since I am too impatient to use the older software it has otherwise. That being said, Cauldron has been stable for me.
Yes the older software and drivers have kept me from using it more seriously. OpenMandriva as said above could be an alternative maybe.
I also thought of trying out Cauldron but everyone in their forum seems to warn about using it as a daily driver like EOS for example.
Let’s go way back in time. Mandrake Linux was the first distro I used on a regular basis. This came after a unusable attempt at running SuSE Linux in the late 1990’s. (No boot without using a boot disc). When they changed their name to Mandriva and went to a “Subscription” model for updates, I switched over to Fedora. I am happy that something is still going on from the Mandriva ashes. Especially since it holds a special place in my heart. It helped to start me down the Linux road.
For me it was Open Suse, but haven’t tried it for a while.
My first attempt at Linux was with SuSE Linux 6.1 in 1999. Despite it being unsuccessful, I learned a lot. Once I felt ready again, in 2003, I decided to go with Mandrake Linux 9.1.
I go into more detail here:
I really need to start the blog up again, and do an update to this entry. I have moved on from Ubuntu.
It wasn’t my first distribution (Slackware was), but in the late nineties and early 2000s Mandrake was one of my favorite distributions, especially for desktop KDE. However the moves to Mandriva and the events surrounding what happened to the original developers put a damper on my interests.
From what I can see now, OpenMandriva appears to be more active than Mageia, but those who regularly use them may have a better feel for the current climate and the usability of the software. This distribution tree certainly has a rich tradition.
Openmandriva doesn’t run in vmware which means I can’t easily test it and so I can’t comment on the current iterations of it. However, when I was able to run it last, Mageia and OpenMandriva had diverged from Mandriva in different directions. I didn’t find them all that similar.
However, I have run Mageia quite a bit and think it is a good distro overall. I am always happy to see distros doing something different than most distros.
The point I always reach with a distro is “Who is it for?” and then “For that person is it better than other distros?”
At this point, with so many distros to choose from, it is often hard to me to answer that question unless a distro is unique in some way.
For example, I can look at Solus and say, “Yeah, I can see why people would like this distro better than other distros”. It might not be the right distro for me, but I can still see why it would be great for someone else. There are any number of distros like that. PopOS, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, etc, etc.
@dalto
OpenMandriva is special because it is rolling, it focuses on KDE,
that makes it a good alternative to OpenSuse
( Which I personally do not like because of software restrictions, *
and faulty package management ) ,
comes fully equipped in contradiction to Fedora where
you have to make a ton of adjustments after install, so in one
sentence it is the perfect dnf related OS out there.
Well I wonder if Mageia Cauldron could be used as a kind of rolling distribution too. Or would it be too unreliable? 
hard to say, I already have like 6 Linux-Systems
running on my 6 machines ( RebornOs, EOS,
Garuda, Sparky-Linux, Manjaro and OpenMandriva )
have no capacity to try
btw. Mageia strongly discourages you from using, it is their development
system and not really a designated rolling distro.
I use cauldron. I have found it to be very reliable.
I think this is more about their desire to not have to support it than it actually being unreliable. I don’t blame them for that either.
I would say it is somewhat similar to running debian testing. They don’t recommend using it for a live system, but many people do anyway.