Almost two years since the last significant release, the release of the Linux distribution Mageia 8 has been published, within which an independent community of enthusiasts is developing a fork of the Mandriva project. 32-bit and 64-bit DVD builds (4 GB) and a set of Live builds (3 GB) based on GNOME, KDE and Xfce are available for download.
Key improvements:
- Updated package versions 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 of 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 starts using Wayland by default, and optional Wayland support has been added to the KDE session.
- Support for installation on partitions with the F2FS file system has been added to the installer. The range of supported wireless chips has been expanded and the ability to download an installation image (Stage2) via Wi-Fi with a connection via WPA2 has been added (previously only WEP was supported). Support for NILFS, XFS, exFAT and NTFS file systems has been improved in the Disk Partition Editor.
- Significantly accelerated download and installation of the distribution in Live mode, thanks to the use of the Zstd compression algorithm in squashfs and 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.
- Optimizations for SSD drives have been added to the rpm package manager and metadata compression has been enabled using the Zstd algorithm instead of Xz. Added option to urpmi to reinstall packages.
- The distribution kit was cleaned from modules tied to Python2.
- The MageiaWelcome application has been redesigned for initial setup and familiarization of the user with the system. The application is written in Python using QML, now supports window resizing and is equipped with a linear interface that offers the user a sequence of configuration steps.
- Isodumper, a utility for burning ISO images to external drives, adds support for image verification using sha3 checksums and the ability to store a partition with saved user data in encrypted form.
- The basic set of codecs includes support for the mp3 format, the patents for which expired in 2017. H.264, H.265/HEVC, and AAC require additional codecs to be installed.
- Work continued to provide support for the ARM platform and transfer this architecture to the number of primary ones. Official builds for ARM are not yet formed, and the installer remains experimental, but the assembly of all packages for AArch64 and ARMv7 has already been provided.
Source: opennet.ru