Mageia is a community-driven project, which has its origins in Mandriva and Mandrake Linux, one of the big classical rpm-based distros of the past. It indeed has an arm64/aarch64 version, but it's still experimental and without an installer or live media; so, instead, I tried the ordinary x86_64 version, with the Mageia 9 KDE Plasma live media (but a netinstall would of course work, too: and, probably, even better), following the instructions for creating a new x86 VM from the Terminal, in Parallels Desktop 20.4.0 (on a 15" M3 MacBook Air with 24 GB of RAM, and 4 GB assigned to the VM): https://www.mageia.org/en/9/ https://kb.parallels.com/it/130217/ ... and I must say that it was surprisingly usable (of course, with delays in doing everything, but not of the totally unusable kind): everything worked, from installing the live system to the VM, to updating it and finally also installing the Parallels Tools (which anyway require the additional kernel-desktop-devel-latest package (and its automatic dependencies), which must be manually installed beforehand: otherwise, the Tools install will fail); and the installed system is definitely usable and stable for a hobbyist/experimental use, even if apps take some seconds to launch. So, let's hope that x86 emulation can be speeded up in the future (BTW, also Windows 10 is currently essentially usable, even if Windows Updates may fail to install; sadly, I haven't had the same luck with Linux Mint, which at least in its Cinnamon flavour is really sluggish: let's hope that also this will improve, as it is one of the most interesting distros, but sadly totally lacking an ARM version, so far)...
... Anyway, I will also try again to do a full clean install of Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon (x86_64-only): https://linuxmint.com/ ... and report back here if something has changed for the better (unlikely, but who knows...).
Linux Mint 22.1 (x86_64) indeed seems to be too slow, in emulation mode; and besides Cinnamon, I also tried the Xfce and MATE desktops: but they are all more or less equally slow. There is an experimental and unofficial Linux Mint ARM port in the works, but it doesn't seem to be available, yet: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/linux-mint-arm64.2459860/ Well, we'll see...
The good news is that Mageia 9 for ARM (Aarch64) works perfectly (also the Tools) when virtualized in Parallels 20.4: and it's relatively easy to install (just follow more or less the same procedure as for Manjaro for ARM); but, also being a command line installation, it requires extensive manual setup afterwards: expand the root partition, set up software repositories with urpmi and create users from the Terminal, manually install a desktop environment (for example, task-plasma5), and finally fine-tune the final result, localization, etc. etc. - not for the faint of hearth, but definitely doable, if one has the time. Let's hope that Mageia 10 will have better ARM support...
