Is Mageia using clang instead of gcc (IIRC, that's something I read about somewhere on the web, but I may be mistaking Mageia for another Mandrake/Mandriva fork) ?
That could be the explanation (there could be some ABI-level incompatibility with NVIDIA's pre-compiled "blob")...
In any case, I'd also recommend that you report your problem on
NVIDIA's support forum and provide them with a full bug report (running nvidia-bug-report.sh and posting the resulting log): NVIDIA's Linux support is great; I got them to fix
all the bugs I found over years, unlike ATI which never ever replied to any of my bug reports and which drops support for their cards after only a few years (3-4 years only !).
You could also report the bug to Mageia's folks (it is abnormal that their distro is the only one to show such a compatibility show-stopper)...
If all this fails, I'd recommend you give a try at
PCLinuxOS (a rolling-release 64 bits distribution which is also a fork of Mandriva).