Recently, Donald Stewart, creator of Mageia Linux, announced the availability of the new version of the Mageia 8 alpha 1 operating system. According to him, this is the first beta version that contains all the planned changes for the upcoming stable version of the system.
What changes does Mageia Linux 8 contain?
Although operating system is based on the old Mandriva Linux, the new update is one of the biggest, and contains countless improvements, changes, and package upgrades. For example, Mageia 8 contains the new Linux Kernel 5.7.4. Thanks to it, the operating system now also supports the exFAT filesystem. In addition to new support, the operating system now also contains updated packages, which are compatible with the Aarch64 and ARM v7 architectures.
Speaking of software and applications, we should mention that in the Alpha 1 version there are also many updated applications, such as glib 2.31, gcc 10.1.1, Chromium 81, Firefox 68.9, LibreOffice 6.4.4, as well as rpm 4.16. Along with the applications, the rpm package manager has also been improved a lot, as a result of which it automatically recognizes SSD drives.
Another change in Mageia 8 is the removal of python2. As we already know, python2 stopped being supported and developed in early 2020, resulting in all application packages being removed from upcoming operating systems.
Moving on, we come to the improved support for filesystems. As we mentioned earlier, the operating system now supports the exFAT. However, this also contains improvements for other systems such as F2FS and Nifs2. In addition, the operating system now uses ZStd compression even more efficiently, resulting in faster boot times, as well as significantly reducing the time required for application installations.
According to Stawart, the planned release date for the stable version of Mageia 8 is September 18. Until then, users will have access to some of the upcoming beta releases on the official website of the operating system.
