Mageia 8 Hits Beta with Plasma 5.19.3, Firefox 78, and Linux Kernel 5.7.9

Mageia 8

The Mageia development team announced today the availability of the beta version of the upcoming Mageia 8 operating system series, due for release later this year.

Mageia 8 beta comes about a month after the release of Mageia 8 alpha and brings with it various updated core components compared to the previous version, which include the Linux 5.7.9 kernel, Mozilla Firefox 78 web browser, LibreOffice 6.4.5 office suite, and KDE Plasma 5.19.3 desktop environment.

The Mageia 8 beta release is available for download right now from the official website for early adopters. Three live editions are provided with the KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Xfce desktop environments for 64-bit computers, and there’s also a 32-bit ISO image only with the Xfce desktop.

Mageia 8 promises to be a massive release of this wonderful GNU/Linux distribution that continues the legacy of the Mandrake Linux operating system.

It will bring improved ARM support with dedicated images for some of the most popular devices out there, faster boot and installation times, and better support for the F2FSĀ (Flash-Friendly File System) and NILFS2 filesystems.

Like most GNU/Linux distributions, it will adopt the Zstd (Zstandard) lossless, real-time data compression algorithm to accelerate not only the installation and boot speed, but also the package metadata parsing within the urpmi package manager.

Python 3 support will be available by default as well in the upcoming release, which will also improve AppStream metadata for better integration with the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktops.

There’s no release date set in stone for the final Mageia 8 release, but it shouldn’t be long until it will hit the streets. Until then, you can get an early taste of the new features and improvements by test driving the beta release. And if you encounter any bugs or issues, please report them here.

Last updated 4 years ago

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