We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 8. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 8. There have been large scale updates of all packages as well as new features implemented to improve what Mageia already offered.
Some of the key updates include:    

• Kernel – 5.7.4
• glib – 2.31
• gcc – 10.1.1
• rpm – 4.16.0
• Chromium – 81 
• Firefox – 68.9
• LibreOffice – 6.4.4
• Plasma – 5.19.1
• GNOME 3.36
• Xfce 4.15.2

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.

For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.

The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce.

Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support, all packages have now been built for Aarch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support. There have been many improvements to the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will give faster boot and installation times. There has also been considerable work with package management, rpm 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, while metadata parsing within urpmi has also been accelerated through the use of ZStd compression, AppStream metadata use has been improved to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma. A full list of features can improvements can be seen 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 8 ready. We look forward to hearing your feedback!