Mageia was created in 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux by a group of former employees of Mandriva S.A. and several other members of the Mandriva community. It is a successor to Mandriva/Mandrake, which was its era’s Ubuntu and had a good implementation of KDE.
The team behind distribution announced the release of Mageia 8. It comes with a wide variety of desktops and window managers, software options, and tools. This release comes after more than a year of development and testing, which is the standard release cadence of Mageia.
Mageia 8 enables AMDGPU by default rather than defaulting to the older Radeon DRM driver. Therefore Mageia now has Vulkan out-of-the-box and better performance than the Radeon DRM driver.
With this release, you can get the prior stable KDE Plasma 5.20.4. Furthermore, the latest XFCE 4.16 is also available. In addition, the current stable GNOME 3.38 is available with all GNOME-related applications and updates.
ARM support has continued to develop, with AArch64 and ARMv7 now having all packages built and being close to primary architectures.
Support for Wi-Fi installation in the classical installer using WPA2 encryption has been added, as well as improved support for newer filesystems allowing installations on F2FS. In addition, support for NILFS, XFS, exFAT, and Windows 10 NTFS has been improved to allow for better partition management.
List of the Major Packages that Ship with Mageia 8
- Kernel 5.10.16
- rpm 4.16.1.2
- dnf 4.6.0
- Mesa 20.3.4
- Plasma 5.20.4
- GNOME 3.38
- Xfce 4.16
- Firefox 78
- Chromium 88
- LibreOffice 7.0.4.2
Download
The release is available to download directly or as a torrent from here. There are classical installer images for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and live DVDs for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and 32-bit Xfce.
So don’t worry if you prefer another desktop; a vast selection is available to install once you are online.