Mageia 8 - Alpha 1 is available for testing to help develop towards a stable final version. There have been updates of all packages, as well as new functions implemented. Some of the updates:
- Kernel - 5.7.4
- glib - 2.31
- gcc - 10.1.1
- rpm - 4.16.0
- Crome - 81
- Firefox - 68.9
- LibreOffice - 6.4.4
- Plasma - 5.19.1
- GNOME 3.36
- Xfce 4.15 .2
The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, providing installation support for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, 64-bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, and a 32-bit live image for Xfce .
Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support. All packages have now been built for Aarch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition from Python 2 and recent hardware support. There have been many improvements to the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2.
Both live and classic environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will provide faster start-up and installation times. Work has also been done considerably with packet management, with 4.16 rpm bringing many improvements, including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, while metadata analysis in urpmi has been accelerated and by using ZStd compression, the use of AppStream metadata has been improved. to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma.