The Mageia team announced the release of Mageia 8, which comes with new exciting features, major updates, and support for recent hardware. The installer images for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and live DVDs for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and 32-bit Xfce are now available. Full details of the upgrade paths from Mageia 7 are supported and can be found in the release notes.
Versions of some of the major packages that ship with Mageia 8:
- kernel 5.10.16
- rpm 4.16.1.2
- urpmi 8.125
- dnf 4.6.0
- Mesa 20.3.4
- Plasma 5.20.4
- GNOME 3.38
- Xfce 4.16
- Firefox 78
- Chromium 88
- LibreOffice 7.0.4.2
The Mageia team also announced that ARM support continued to develop with AArch64 and ARMv7 having all packages built and being close to primary architectures. The team also added support for Wi-Fi installation in the classical installer using WPA2 encryption has been added, as well as improved support for newer filesystems allowing installations on F2FS.
Mageia 8 also supports NILFS, XFS, exFAT and Windows 10 NTFS has been improved and now allows better partition management. Mageia’s live installer has also had significant development and boot times reduced with the use of Zstd compression and improved hardware detection and the support for installing updates as a final step of the installation has been added. According to the announcement, Zstd compression has also been applied to the rescue mode, allowing for faster startup, support for encrypted LVM/LUKS has also been added.