I’ve never heard of it, and I’d like to consider myself a seasoned user (since 1998). Probably not underrated, just unknown.

Megeia is the continuation of Mandriva. Mandriva, in turn, was the result of the merger of two projects: Mandrake: A French distro, extremely popular in Europe during the late 90s/early 2000s. So much so, it was considered one of the big 4 distros at the time, the others being Red Hat, SuSE and Slackware. Most of it's intended target audience has since moved on Ubuntu and derivatives. Conectiva: Brazilian distro. Also kind of popular, but more focused on the enterprise desktop market. I haven't used Mandriva/Mandrake in a loooooooong ass time. Same is true for Red Hat/Fedora or SuSE. I remember Mandrake having lot's of GUI based configuration tools called Drake SomehtingOrOther. I think you definitively should try it out. If only so you can say you're rolling with a distro derived from an "Ancient and Noble Pedigree". You won't earn too much nerd cred with "sorta but not really" old timers like myself by sticking with Mandriva for too long, though. Just like Arch and Ubuntu nowadays, "Real Men" were expected to go from Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE to Slackware once they became proficient. I'll go tend to my lawn now. /nostalgia EDIT: Yes, I too have moved on from Gentoo since. Ubuntu user, love Unity. Life is too short for distros that challenge me.

Anything at Distrowatch.com in the top 25 are great Linux distros. Mageia is rank 16. Meaning a good strong Linux community. And that's all you need from any Linux distro. A strong community. http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mageia http://www.mageia.org/en/ http://fossforce.com/2015/06/a-look-at-mageia-5s-magic/ http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2015/08/mageia-5-so-much-better-than-last-time.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia You can't go wrong with KDE. KDE is my favorite DE. As long you have the hardware to support KDE. Go for it. You should be fine using Mageia as your primary OS. Even if your are a beginner.