Mageia 8 Released - Flips On AMDGPU For Older GCN GPUs, Better ARM Support

Mageia 8 is out today as a significant and long overdue update to this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva/Mandrake lineage.

Mageia 8 entered alpha nearly one year ago with better ARM support, compressing RPM metadata using Zstd instead of XZ, Python 2 removal work, and more. Mageia 8 Beta then arrived over the summer with more updates. Earlier this month the Mageia 8 release candidate arrived with an interesting change of enabling AMDGPU by default for GCN 1.0 / 1.1 GPUs rather than defaulting to the older Radeon DRM driver. This means those original GCN GPUs now have Vulkan out-of-the-box, AMDGPU DC, and in some cases better performance compared to the Radeon DRM driver.

Mageia 8 now in its released state has the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, KDE Plasma 5.20.4 as the default desktop but with options for GNOME 3.38 and Xfce 4.16, DNF 4.6, and a plethora of updated packages. The Mageia 8 live installer is another area that has seen much improvement.

Mageia 8 downloads and more information on this big Linux distribution update via Mageia.org.