After being in hard development for more than a year and a half, the solid Mandriva-based Linux distribution Mageia 8 has been finally released.
Mageia 8 comes with new exciting features, major software updates for many included apps, as well as better support for the recent hardware, as it ships by default with the latest long-term support (LTS) Linux kernel 5.10.16 which provides better graphics support thanks to the up-to-date Mesa 20.3.4.
The live session is now faster due to optimized hardware detection and use of Zstd for compressing the base file system, and it has now an optional persistence feature that supports encryption preserving user files and customization of the system to the next boot.
The ARM support has been improved as well and most of the distribution has been built successfully on this architecture, and an installation image is planned to release in the coming months for popular ARM devices, python2 packages have been removed, the Mageia welcome screen app has been entirely reworked to have a linear approach, the Microsoft's NTFS file system is supported on Mageia 8, and the XFS, exFAT, and Nilfs2 file systems are seen also some improvements in this release.
For AMD/ATI graphics cards, Mageia 8 uses the free AMDGPU video drivers for the newer cards and the Radeon graphic driver for the older cards. On the other hand, The libre Nouveau driver is used for the NVIDIA GPUs, which has seen improved hardware support and performance over the previous version, the NVIDIA's proprietary drivers (nvidia-current for newer GPUs, and nvidia390 for the older cards) and are provided as well in the repositories.
Mageia 8 provides installation images for three methods for both 32 bit and 64-bit systems available to download from the distribution official website: a network install ISO, a live install ISO for Gnome 3.38.8 (only for 64 bit), KDE Plasma 5.20.4 (only for 64 bit), and Xfce 4.16 (for both 32 and 64 bit) desktop environments, and a classical ISO suitable to the installation and to upgrade from an earlier release that contains all supported locales, a large variety of packages to choose from including most supported desktop environments (Gnome, KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, Lxqt...) and all non-free drivers.
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