Everyone at Mageia is very happy to get the first step towards Mageia 7 released! Mageia 7 beta 1 comes with lots of exciting changes and updates, and while a beta with lots of development work, it has been a nice release for a beta, not needing too many rounds of building to get workable images.

There is still a lot of work to come before Mageia 7 is ready, a big Qt and Plasma update, fixes for MATE and more checks on 32-bit hardware as well as the artwork for Mageia 7. We are all looking forward to implementing these changes and getting all of the rough edges polished out with all of the help from the community.

This release will see the return of the Classical Installer as well as the Live Images, with the standard lineup of architectures and Desktop Environments – 32 and 64-bit Classical Installers; 64-bit Plasma, GNOME and Xfce Live DVD’s and a 32 bit Xfce Live DVD.

The ISO’s will be available to download directly, and by torrent here.

Here are a few release highlights and package versions:

• kernel 4.19.6
• rpm 4.14.2
• Plasma 5.14.2
• GNOME 3.30
• Xfce 4.13.4
• Firefox 63
• Chromium 70
• LibreOffice 6.1.3

A full list of included software is available in the idx file for Classical ISO’s and the lst file for the Live Images.

We have also updated most of the programming languages to their latest versions, PHP was a particularly large update, going from 5.6 to 7.2. AppStream metadata support has also been enhanced, giving a much richer experience with software selection in both GNOME and Plasma through their respective software search tools, there have also been improvements to laptops with Optimus and to the ARM port. More details are available here.

We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.

A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 7 ready.