Almost two years after the last significant release, the release of the Linux distribution Mageia 8 has been published, within which a fork of the project is being developed by an independent community of enthusiasts Mandriva. For downloads there are 32- and 64-bit DVD builds (4GB) and a set of Live builds (3GB) available based on GNOME, KDE and Xfce.
Key improvements :
- Updated versions of packages , including Linux kernel 5.10.16, glibc 2.32, LLVM 11.0.1, GCC 10.2, rpm 4.16.1.2 , dnf 4.6.0, Mesa 20.3.4, X.Org 1.20.10, Firefox 78, Chromium 88, LibreOffice 7.0.4.2, Python 3.8.7, Perl 5.32.1, Ruby 2.7.2, Rust 1.49.0, PHP 8.0.2, Java 11, Qt 5.15.2, GTK 3.24.24 / 4.1.0, QEmu 5.2, Xen 4.14, VirtualBox 6.1.18.
- Updated desktop versions for KDE Plasma 5.20.4, GNOME 3.38, Xfce 4.16, LXQt 0.16.0, MATE 1.24.2, Cinnamon 4.8.3 and Enlightenment E24.2. GNOME sessions now start using Wayland by default, and optional Wayland support has been added to KDE sessions.
- The installer has added support for installation on partitions with the F2FS file system. The range of supported wireless chips has been expanded and the ability to download the installation image (Stage2) over Wi-Fi with a WPA2 connection has been added (previously only WEP was supported). The Disk Partition Editor has improved support for NILFS, XFS, exFAT and NTFS file systems.
- The download and installation of the distribution kit in Live mode has been significantly accelerated, thanks to the use of the Zstd compression algorithm in squashfs and the optimization of hardware detection. Added support for installing updates at the last stage of distribution installation.
- Added support for recovering LVM / LUKS encrypted partitions to crash recovery boot mode.
- Added optimizations for SSD drives to rpm package manager and enabled metadata compression using Zstd algorithm instead of Xz. An option has been added to urpmi to reinstall packages.
- The distribution has been cleaned of modules bound to Python2.
- Redesigned MageiaWelcome application designed for initial setup and familiarization of the user with the system. The application is written in Python using QML, now supports resizing of the window and has a linear interface that guides the user through a series of steps to configure.
- Isodumper, a utility for writing ISO images to external drives, adds support for image verification using sha3 checksums and the ability to store a partition with persistent user data in encrypted form.
- Support for mp3 format, patents expired in 2017, is included in the base codec set. H.264, H.265 / HEVC and AAC require additional codecs to be installed.
- Work continued on providing support for the ARM platform and making this architecture primary. Official assemblies for ARM are not being formed yet, and the installer remains experimental, but the assembly of all packages for AArch64 and ARMv7 has already been provided.
/Media reports.