After almost two years since the last significant release, the Mageia 8 Linux distribution has been published, developed by an independent community of enthusiasts as a fork of the Mandriva project. Both 32-bit and 64-bit DVD images (4 GB) and a set of Live images (3 GB) based on GNOME, KDE, and Xfce are available for download.
Key Improvements:
- Updated package versions include 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 environments include 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. The GNOME session now launches by default using Wayland, with optional Wayland support added to the KDE session.
- The installer now supports installation on partitions with the F2FS file system. The range of supported wireless chips has been expanded, and it is now possible to download the installation image (Stage2) via Wi-Fi using WPA2 (previously only WEP was supported). The partition editor has improved support for NILFS, XFS, exFAT, and NTFS file systems.
- Booting and installing the distribution in Live mode has been significantly sped up thanks to the use of the Zstd compression algorithm in squashfs and optimization of hardware detection. Support for installing updates at the last stage of the distribution installation has been added.
- The boot mode for recovery now includes support for restoring encrypted LVM/LUKS partitions.
- The rpm package manager has been optimized for SSD drives, using metadata compression with the Zstd algorithm instead of Xz. An option to reinstall packages has been added to urpmi.
- The distribution has been cleaned of modules tied to Python2.
- The MageiaWelcome application, intended for initial setup and user familiarization with the system, has been revamped. This application is written in Python using QML, now supports window resizing, and features a linear interface that guides the user through the setup steps.
- Isodumper, a utility for writing ISO images to external drives, has added support for image verification using sha3 checksums and the ability to store the user data section in encrypted form.
- The basic codec pack now includes support for the mp3 format, whose patents expired in 2017. Additional codecs are required for H.264, H.265/HEVC, and AAC.
- Work continues to provide support for the ARM platform and to transition this architecture into the primary category. Official builds for ARM are not yet being generated, and the installer remains experimental, but all packages have been compiled for AArch64 and ARMv7.
Source: opennet.ru
