The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady.

The current situation is that major packages have been updated to latest versions, such as:

– basesystem with systemd 246, glibc 2.31, GCC 10.2, LLVM 10.0.1, urpmi 8.123, DNF 4.2.23 and rpm 4.16.0 ;

– Java stack updated to java-11-openjdk (11.0.9.6) and built against this version;- python 3.8.5, rust 1.47, ruby 2.7.2, Golang 1.15.3,…

We decided to stop  supporting Java 8, and only have Java 11. This requires fixing the Java stack, as some applications  have never been ported, and therefore have to be removed, while others have to be updated to the ported version.

On the desktop side, we have an updated x11-server to 1.20.9 stack. A Wayland session for GNOME is available on Intel, AMD and even NVIDIA (with nvidia-current nonfree drivers). KDE Plasma is based on QT 5.15.1 with Plasma-Workspace 5.20.2, which can permit a wayland session preview. All infrastructure is here for it to have a desktop running on modern technologies. By default, we still ship Plasma with an X11 session on all hardware.

GNOME is at 3.38.1. LXqt is 0.16. XFCE is at 4.15 preview and is a good candidate to move to the 4.16 release before we ship Mageia 8.

All other desktop environments are updated and run well (Cinnamon 4.6, MATE 1.24.1).

Firefox and Thunderbird are at same version as in Mageia 7 (78 ESR branch).

Developers are working on hopefully getting the Chromium browser to build.

Preventing us from releasing Mageia 8, the remaining issues are:

1) Some packages can’t build. There are 300 of them (among more than 14,500 in Core). Packagers and developers are working diligently to get these packages fixed.
2) We must provide a secure Mageia 8 operating system. Currently, there are over 70 security related bugs, and ones that can be fixed must be fixed before release.
3) NVIDIA drivers with 5.9 series Linux kernel make it difficult to have a good working set-up for all use cases. Currently, X11 drivers (OpenGL) are OK for the 455 and 390 series, but OpenCL and CUDA are broken due to change in the 5.9 Linux Kernel. We don’t have an ETA on fixing this yet so, nvidia-340 can’t run well with this 5.9.x kernel.
4) Dependency issues in packages which would prevent them from being installed.  Packagers are working to get these issues fixed as well.
5) Other various release blocker bugs also need to be ironed out.
A new Beta 2 ISO will be pushed as soon as these issues are resolved.

These difficulties are challenging, so we will release as soon it is ready.
See you soon!

Mageia Team

Writen by Aurélien