Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel

Jul 16, 2017 21:07 GMT  ·  By

After a long wait, the final release of the Mageia 6 GNU/Linux operating system is finally here, and it looks like it comes with a lot of exciting new features and performance improvements.

According to Mageia contributor Rémi Verschelde, development of the major Mageia 6 release took longer than anticipated because the team wanted to transform it into their greatest release yet. Mageia 6 comes more than two years after the Mageia 5 series, and seven and a half months after Mageia 5.1.

"Though Mageia 6’s development was much longer than anticipated, we took the time to polish it and ensure that it will be our greatest release so far," reads today's announcement. "We thank our community for their patience, and also our packagers and QA team who provided an extended support for Mageia 5 far beyond the initial schedule."

Here's what's new in Mageia 6

Highlights of Mageia 6 include the KDE Plasma 5.8.7 LTS desktop environment, Red Hat's DNF package manager as an alternative to Mandriva's old urpmi package management tool, allowing users to install packages from third-party repos like Fedora COPR or OpenSuSE Build Service.

GRUB2 is now the default bootloader implementation in Mageia 6, which is powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.9 series, specifically version 4.9.35, and comes with a modern graphics stack using the Mesa 17.1.4 3D Graphics Library, as well as both X.Org Server 1.19.3 and Wayland 1.11.0 display servers.

Alternative desktop environments available in Mageia 6 include GNOME 3.24.2, Xfce 4.12.1, Cinnamon 3.2.8, MATE 1.18, and LXQt 0.11, and among some of the most popular apps included we can mention the Firefox 52.2.0 ESR and Chromium 57 web browser, LibreOffice 5.3.4.2 office suite, and Mozilla Thunderbird 52.2.1 email & news client.

With Mageia 6, the team also wanted to modernize and unify the look of their GNU/Linux distribution, so they created a brand new system theme and icon set, with the help of designer Timothée Giet. Mageia 6 will be supported for the next 18 months, until January 16, 2019, with security and software updates.

Users of Mageia 5, which will be supported for only three months from the moment of writing this article, until October 31, 2017, are urged to update to Mageia 6 as soon as possible. You can download Mageia 6 as KDE, GNOME, and Xfce Live ISOs, as well as Classical Installer images for both 64-bit and 32-bit hardware architectures.

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Mageia 6 released
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