I personally have not liked CentOS since the time I was developing some SNMP stuff using net-snmp, including some MIBs and plugins to support a specific product.

I did the initial development across two versions of Mandriva (Mandriva 2009 on devel system, and Mandriva 2008 on a system that had the card I was developing for plugged in). After I had everything working, I tested it in mixed environments including OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Fedora. After a meeting, we decided to try a deployment on CentOS with the idea that this would be the host environment for the product we pushed out the door.

Couldn't get it to work. Net-snmp is badly documented to begin with, and does not do a good job of maintaining backward compatibility, and has many distro-specific variances in syntax, so you have to be very careful about your versioning. Turns out that the development work I had done with Net-snmp was on a later version of net-snmp than was available for CentOS...and the version for CentOS was about 3 years old, and my code would not run on CentOS.

So, I started downloading and compiling. Got into dependency hell, and was even compiling custom kernels for CentOS. Finally said: "this is BS...when I finally DO get this working, it won't be CentOS anymore" and stopped.

CentOS's reputation is for stability. If you want to put together a plain vanilla server that will work and keep working, CentOS might be a good choice. But customizing it can get painful given that it doesn't keep up.

I have to agree about Mageia. I moved to it for my workstation from Mandriva (for obvious reasons). The installer is less versatile than it should be, and this caused me some problems with the initial installation. However, since that time, I have found Mageia 3 to be extremely robust and stable. I run a very heavy system, with full up KDE 4 (and all the toys...because I like them). I also am usually running several virtual machines.

Mageia 3 has the tools that make configuring the system generally easy...well...at least, as easy as it gets with KDE+compiz which has a ridiculous number of configurable items. Systemd has taken some getting used to, but it all works pretty well.

Beyond that, it stands up very well under the virtual machine load I throw at it. I use VMware Workstation and my VMs include several different Linux distros as well as several different Windows distros (including Win7 Pro, which is very taxing as a VM).

The distro is still a bit immature. Nonetheless, I find it to be an excellent production environment. I definitely like it better than OpenSUSE (which I make extensive use of because I develop, support, and maintain a compression router product line that is based on that distro), and I have never liked Ubuntu. I also have and/or have had and used most of the other major distros. Most have their advantages, but overall I find Mageia works very well - better than the alternatives - for my purposes.