Mageia is GNU/Linux distribution that was created in 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux. It was originally planned to be released on a nine-month release cycle, with each release to be supported for 18 months.
Actual practice has been to release a new version when the Mageia development community feels the new release is ready from quality and stability viewpoints.
The latest stable version is Mageia 7.1, released in July 2019 as a minor bugfix and update to Mageia 7.
Mageia 8 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Above all, some of the major improvements include improved ARM support. Secondly, now packages have now been built for AArch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support.
There have been many improvements in the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression. This will give faster boot and installation times.
There has also been considerable work in Mageia 8 Beta 1 with package management. For instance, RPM 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed.
Here are some of the major packages included in this release:
- Kernel – 5.7.9
- glib – 2.31
- gcc – 10.1.1
- rpm – 4.16.0
- Chromium – 81
- Firefox – 78
- LibreOffice – 6.4.5
- Plasma – 5.19.3
- GNOME 3.36
- Xfce 4.15.2
In conclusion, for those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
