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The OpenMandriva community announced today the availability for public testing of the Release Candidate (RC) milestone of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 distribution, due in early 2021.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 “Argon” entered developed about five months ago, and, since a full release cycle takes about half a year, the final release is due very soon. In fact, the OpenMandriva team promises a final release as soon as early 2021, but for now they pushed the Release Candidate for one last testing round.
Yes, there was no Beta release published during this cycle as it turned out its quality was close to the Release Candidate milestone than the Beta one during an intensive internal testing.
Compared to the Alpha milestone, the Release Candidate upgrades the KDE Plasma desktop environment from version 5.19.3 to 5.20.4, the KDE Applications software suite from version 20.04.3 to 20.12.0, the KDE Frameworks software suite from version 5.72 to 5.77, and LibreOffice office suite from version 7.0 to 7.1.
Under the hood, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is now powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series. The Release Candidate ships with Linux kernel 5.10.3 by default with Zstandard support, as well as Mesa 20.3, X.Org Server 1.20.10, systemd 247, LLVM/Clang 11.0, GCC 10.2, GNU C Library 2.32, and Calamares 3.2.33.
But, besides the software updates, the biggest change in the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release is full support for ARM64 (AArch64) devices like the Raspberry Pi and PineBook Pro. Installation images are already available for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and PineBook Pro here.
However, the even better news for ARM64 fans is that installation images will also be provided for SynQuacer, CuBox Pulse, and other generic UEFI compatible devices like most of the AArch64 server boards, and even for PINE64’s PinePhone Linux phone.
As mentioned before, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 “Argon” is due for release in early 2021. A final release date is not yet set in stone, but I believe that it may see the light of day later this month if no major bugs are discovered. For now, you can help achieve that goal by downloading and testing the Release Candidate.
Keep in mind though that this is still a pre-release version and NOT the final product, so don’t use it on a production machine.
Last updated 3 years ago
