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The Mageia 9 GNU/Linux distribution has been officially released today as a major update to this Mandriva Linux-derived distro for the masses that introduces newer technologies, new features, and many improvements.
Powered by the Linux 6.4 kernel series, Mageia 9 is here with a smaller disk footprint for minimal installations when disabling the recommended packages, adoption of SQLite for the RPM database for faster package management, and Zstd compression for the stage1 images.
This release also drops the 15-years-old forked NFS code for NFS support, which is now done using system tools, lets you specify a port different than “80” when using an HTTP server, switches cURL instead of GNU Wget for downloading packages during the installation, and enables the NetworkManager system service by default in the KDE Plasma live ISO.
Hardware support has been enhanced in Mageia 9 as it uses the Mesa 23.1 graphics stack, a kernel-linus flavor with vanilla stock kernel and without any extra patchset, support for the latest NVIDIA proprietary drivers in the non-free repositories, out-of-the-box support for Prime GPU offloading in the Nouveau drivers, and a new tool called Mageia-prime to configure NVIDIA Prime on supported systems.
Mageia 9 also supports both PulseAudio and PipeWire as sound servers, but it still defaults to PulseAudio. Those who want to use PipeWire can switch from PulseAudio through the Mageia Control Center.
Mageia’s default desktop environment was always KDE Plasma, which has been updated to Plasma 5.27.5 and accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.105 and KDE Gear 23.04.1 software suites. Other supported desktops include GNOME 44.2, Xfce 4.18, LXQt 1.3.0, MATE 1.26.0, and Cinnamon 5.6.
For more details about all the updated packages in Mageia 9 and other information, check out the release notes. Meanwhile, you can download the live and installation images from the official website.
Last updated 8 months ago
