The Mageia development team announced just a few moments ago that they'd released the first stabilization snapshot (sta1) of the upcoming Mageia 6 Linux operating system.
It's been a while since we heard anything from the Mageia developers, but it looks like they were pretty busy behind the curtains upgrading most of the core components of the major Mageia 6 Linux distribution, which is expected to arrive in the next few months. The Mageia 6 sta1 release comes with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies.
Shipping with the recently announced Linux 4.6.3 kernel, the Mageia 6 sta1 snapshot brings GRUB 2 as the default bootloader, the KDE Plasma 5.6.4, GNOME 3.20.3, MATE 1.14.1, and Cinnamon 3.0.1 desktop environments, the LibreOffice 5.1.4.2 office suite, the Mozilla Thunderbird 45 email and news client, and Mozilla Firefox 45 ESR and Chromium 51.0 web browsers.
"The first stabilization snapshot, as the name suggests, aims to start bringing everything together and getting the new software stable enough for release. Most of the big updates since dev1 have been moving from beta/RC releases of major software components to stable ones, which will hopefully give a nicely polished feel to the release," reads today's announcement.
Live DVDs are now available for public testing
Looking at the release notes, we can see that there have been a lot of changes lately in the Mageia world. For example, the team decided to no longer offer Live CDs with Mageia Linux and move to Live DVDs instead because users will benefit from a full-featured version of the operating system. In the same manner, the dual-arch DVDs were dropped as well.
There are also a lot of under-the-hood changes, including the move to GNU C Library 2.22, and many bug fixes. Starting today, Mageia 6 has entered version freeze, which means that most of the package versions of the software components mentioned above will stay the same for the final release, with the exception of the Linux kernel, as the Mageia team would like to upgrade it to the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel.
That being said, it looks like when Mageia 6 is out, it should offer users one of the best bleeding-edge GNU/Linux distributions on the market. In the meantime, if you want an early taste, you can go ahead and download today's Mageia 6 sta1 ISO images right now via our website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not yet suitable for production use.
