
Recently, Donald Stewart, creator of Mageia Linux, announced the availability of the new version of the operating system Mageia 8 alpha 1. According to him, this is the first beta version which contains all the planned changes for the next stable version of the system.
What changes does the Mageia Linux 8 contain?
Although it is functional This is based on the old Mandriva Linux, the new update is one of the largest, and contains countless improvements, changes, and package upgrades. For example, Mageia 8 contains the new one Linux Kernel 5.7.4. Thanks to it, the operating system now supports exFAT filesystem. In addition to new support, the operating system now also contains updated packages, which are compatible with the Aarch64 and ARM v7 architectures.
Speaking of software and them applications, we must mention that in the Alpha 1 version there are many updated applications, such as glib 2.31, gcc 10.1.1, Chromium 81, Firefox 68.9, LibreOffice 6.4.4, and rpm 4.16. Along with the applications, the rpm package manager has also been improved a lot, automatically recognizing SSDs.

Another change in Mageia 8 is the removal of its packages python2. As we already know, python2 has stopped being supported and is still being developed in early 2020, with the result that all application packages are removed from future operating systems.
Going further, we also come to the improved support of filesystems. As mentioned earlier, the functional now supports the system exFAT. However, this also includes improvements for other systems such as F2FS and Nifs2. In addition, the operating system now uses ZStd compression even more efficiently, making it faster boot, as well as significantly reduce the time required for application installations.
According to Stawart, the scheduled release date of the stable version of Mageia 8 is September 18. Until then, users will have access to some of the upcoming beta versions, within official webpage of the operating system.