A few minutes ago, March 27, 2016, the development team of the Mageia project announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first devel version of the upcoming Mageia 6 Linux operating system.
It's been a while since we heard anything from Mageia, as the last release, Mageia 5, was announced back in June 2015, but it looks like the developers behind the Mandriva-based operating system have been quite busy in the last few months, mostly switching to the new KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
Today's Mageia 6 first development snapshot brings the Beta of KDE Plasma 5.6, along with the latest GNU/Linux technologies, including Linux kernel 4.4.5 LTS, the second milestone of GNOME 3.20 (3.19.2), Glibc 2.22, systemd 229, LibreOffice 5.1.1 office suite, as well as the Mozilla Firefox 45 and Chromium 49 web browsers.
"After the delays caused by upgrading the major parts of the base system and switching to the Plasma 5 Desktop Environment, we are very happy to announce that the first development milestone of Mageia 6 has been released and is ready for testing by the community," reads today's announcement.
Final KDE Plasma 5.6 and GNOME 3.20 are in the repos
However, the good thing is that, at the moment of writing this article, the final releases of the GNOME 3.20 and KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environments are live in the main software repositories of the distribution, so after installing Mageia 6 Dev1, you'll be able to update the system to these latest builds.
Besides GNOME 3.20 and KDE Plasma 5.6, the MATE 1.13.0 and Cinnamon 2.8.6 desktop environments have also been added in this first development release of Mageia 6, which should arrive later this year with many other goodies and an official ARM port. In the meantime, you can download the Mageia 6 Dev1 installation-only ISOs and take the OS for a test drive. Please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version.
