EOL has been postponed until December 31, 2017

Nov 9, 2017 17:15 GMT  ·  By

Mageia's Rémi Verschelde announced that support for the Mageia 5 series of the open-source operating system had been postponed until the end of the year due to issues with the upgrade path to Mageia 6.

In the blog announcement, the Mageia developer explains that the team decided to postpone the EOL (End-of-Life) for the Mageia 5 release, which was supposed to reach end of life on October 31, until New Year's Eve, because many Mageia 5 users haven't upgraded to Mageia 6.

Announced on July 16, 2017, Mageia 6 is the latest stable release of the GNU/Linux distribution, incorporating some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications, including the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, AppStream support, GRUB2 as default bootloader, a new Xfce Live edition, and much more.

The upgrade path was also open to Mageia 5 users immediately after the release of Mageia 6, which is supported until January 16, 2019, but it looks like not all users were are able to upgrade because of various issues related to KDE4, the Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers, or other third-party packages.

The extended Mageia 5 support will be limited to critical security flaws

The extended two-month support for Mageia 5 users will be limited to critical security vulnerabilities only. During this time, users won't be exposed to any known security exploits, but they are urged to upgrade to Mageia 6 using the advice provided by the Mageia team on their latest blog announcement.

"Your Mageia 5 system will not be exposed to known critical vulnerabilities until its EOL in 2 months, but the support will still be much more limited than that of Mageia 6 systems," said Rémi Verschelde. "We encourage the remaining Mageia 5 users to use this time to upgrade to Mageia 6 as soon as possible."

If some Mageia 5 users can't upgrade to Mageia 6 after the end of life is reached on December 31, 2017, it is recommended to do a fresh install of the Mageia 6 operating system. Don't forget to make a backup of your most important files first. You can download Mageia 6 right now through our web portal.