14 DAY TRIAL // Donald Stewart of the Mageia Linux team announced a few moments ago that the upcoming and long-anticipated Mageia 6 Linux operating reached RC (Release Candidate) state.
That's right, Mageia 6 Release Candidate is finally here, which means that it won't be long until the final release of the operating system hits the streets in its production-ready state. This RC version comes two and a half months after the sta2 milestone, so the development team had quite some time on their hands to implement some of the latest technologies and software versions.
"The extra time that this release has taken has had one huge benefit: the number of new and exciting additions to Mageia is staggering. They include the now far more mature Plasma to replace KDE4, the DNF and COPR stacks to supplement urpmi, big updates to the major desktops and the other large stacks and components, and lots of package updates," said Donald Stewart in the release announcement.
Here's what's new in Mageia 6 Release Candidate
Powered by the Linux 4.9.28 LTS kernel and X.Org Server 1.19.3 display server, Mageia 6 Release Candidate now uses the KDE Plasma 5.8.6 LTS desktop environment for the KDE edition to replace KDE4, the latest GNOME 3.24.3 packages on the GNOME flavor, and Xfce 4.12.1 on the Xfce edition. It also ships with the MATE 1.18.2 and Cinnamon 3.2.8 desktops.
Among the pre-installed software applications, we can mention the latest LibreOffice 5.3.3 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 52.0 ESR web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird 52.0 email and news client, as well as the Chromium 57 web browser. The installer also received some attention in this release to better support VirtualBox virtual machines and proprietary drivers.
Those who can't wait until the final release of Mageia 6 hits the streets should download the Mageia 6 Release Candidate Live ISO images with either KDE Plasma, GNOME or Xfce desktops and take them for a test drive. Please try to keep in mind that these are still pre-release versions so make sure you don't install them on production machines.