Mageia 8 Beta 1 Released With Many Improvements

The first beta of the forthcoming Mageia 8 is now available, the Linux distribution that traces its roots back to Mandriva/Mandrake.

Following Mageia 8 Alpha 1 just over one month ago, Mageia 8 Beta 1 is now available for testing this weekend. The theme for Mageia 8 has been working to improve the ARM support, nearly completed their transition off Python 2, RPM package metadata being compressed by Zstd rather than XZ, and other changes. Mageia 8 successfully is building all packages for ARMv7 and AArch64. The Mageia 8 installer is also better supporting both F2FS and NILFS2.

Among the key package versions as of Mageia 8 Beta 1 are the Linux 5.7.9 kernel, GCC 10.1.1 compiler, RPM 4.16, KDE Plasma 5.19.3, GNOME 3.36, and Xfce 4.15.2, among many other package updates.

More details and download links for today's Mageia 8 beta release via Mageia.org. Mageia 8 development continues running behind schedule with the first beta originally scheduled to arrive at the end of June. A second beta is still expected followed by the package version freeze and then likely two release candidates. Originally Mageia 8 was expected for release in mid-September but now given the current delays we are looking at the stable release more than likely coming around November.