I was pretty unhappy with what was going on at Mandriva. Many (all?) employees were fired, etc. At GUADEC I was told to wait a bit before switching distributions (assume they were planning the fork). I still investigated other distributions, but didn’t switch yet.
Anyway, noticed today that a lot of people from the distribution and former employees are forking Mandriva as Mageia. The name will again will take me a few years to get used to, but happy to see the independence. Loads of people are already offering their help. Pretty awesome to see this happen.
Hopefully they manage to kick it start as Mandriva is most easiest to learn and use for new and basic users (not forgetting advanced users). And the how Mandriva has always compiled Linux OS (kernel), they have managed to get best hardware support when compared to any other Linux distribution.
Hopefully they do small changes as well, like they could change MCC tools as backends and then make frontends for them what would fit to KDE plasma desktop as well than to GTK+ maded desktop environments.
Mandriva lives!
http://blog.mandriva.com/2010/09/20/mandriva-news-by-the-board/