Mageia Linux developer Donald Stewart has announced the availability of a new development version, Mageia 8 alpha 1. It is the first testing ISO release that showcases all new changes for the upcoming stable Mageia 8.
Mageia 8 GNU/Linux: What’s New?
Mageia is a GNU/Linux-based operating system forked out from the legendary Mandriva Linux. The upcoming Mageia 8 is a major release that comprises numerous improvements, new features, and updates to all packages.
Starting with the core components, Mageia 8 ships a new Linux Kernel 5.7.4. Subsequently, kernel 5.7.4 brings support for new hardware and features such as a new exFAT filesystem driver, and a tiny power button driver. If you want to know details of all new enhancements that kernel 5.7 comes with, read our article presenting the top 10 features in Linux kernel 5.7.
Other major improvements include enhanced support for ARM. With Mageia 8, all packages have now been built to support Aarch64 and ARM v7 architecture.
Among tools and software, the Alpha 1 release has also added new versions of several core packages such as glib 2.31, gcc 10.1.1, Chromium 81, Firefox 68.9, LibreOffice 6.4.4, and rpm 4.16. Additionally, the updated rpm package manager brings many improvements, including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed.
Furthermore, Mageia 8 has removed all python2 modules and software. Since Python2 reached its end-of-life in January, all core packages of Mageia no longer rely on Python2.
Moving forward, Mageia installer has also received major improvements like better support for F2FS and Nilfs2 filesystem. Both the live and classical environments are now enhanced with the use of ZStd compression to achieve faster boot and installation times.
For a comprehensive list of new features, you can read the official release notes.
Mageia 8 Release Date
Here’s the development schedule for the Magei 8.
| Stage | Estimated Release Date | Public | Released On |
| Alpha 1 | 13 June | Developers and packagers | 26 June |
| Beta 1 | 27 June | Developers and packagers | |
| Beta 2 | 11 July | Developers and packagers | |
| Versions Freeze | 18 July | ||
| Release Candidate 1 | 1 August | ||
| Release Freeze | 16 August | ||
| Release Candidate 2 | 1 September | ||
| Final Release | 18 September | Developers, anyone |
If you want to test the alpha 1 release, grab the torrent file or direct ISO image from here. As usual, the images are available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
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