Mageia is a Linux-based operating system, distributed as free and open source software. It was forked from the Mandriva Linux distribution. The Greek term mageía means enchantment, fascination, glamour, wizardry.

History
Mageia was created in 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux, by a group of former employees of Mandriva S.A. and several other members of the Mandriva community.
On September 2, 2010, Edge IT, one of the subsidiaries of Mandriva, was placed under liquidation process by the Tribunal de commerce in Paris; effective September 17, all assets were liquidated and employees were let go.
The next day, on September 18, 2010, some of these former employees, who were mostly responsible for the development and maintenance of the Mandriva Linux distribution, and several community members announced the creation of Mageia, with the support of many members of the community of developers, users and employees of Mandriva Linux.

Desktop environments
Mageia can use all major desktop environments. As was the case with Mandrake and Mandriva Linux, KDE is the main and the most used environment. End-users can choose from KDE and GNOME 64 bit Live DVD editions, 32 bit and 64 bit Xfce live DVD editions, and any environment in the full DVD installation edition.

It uses Mageia Control Center. LXDE, LXQt, Cinammon, MATE and Enlightenment are also available.

Application repository
Mageia offers a very large repository of software, such as productivity applications and a large variety of games. It was the first Linux distribution in which MariaDB replaced Oracle's MySQL.

Development
Mageia was originally planned to be released on a nine-month release cycle, with each release to be supported for 18 months.
Actual practice has been to release a new version when the Mageia development community feels the new release is ready from quality and stability viewpoints.