In Pictures: Meet Mageia, a rising Linux star

If the world of Linux distributions has ever had a rising star, it's Mageia. Launched roughly two years ago as a fork of Mandriva Linux by former employees and contributors to that French distro, Mageia sprinted up the page-hit rankings on DistroWatch, where it has sat at No. 2 for many months.

At the end of 2011, Mandriva was No. 10, and Mageia was nowhere to be found. Today, Mageia is behind only Linux Mint; Ubuntu Linux, Fedora, and openSUSE round out the top five. Mandriva, meanwhile, has dropped to No. 36.