Mageia 9-rc1 Now Available For This Long-Delayed Release

The release candidate for Mageia 9 is now available for this Linux distribution that's an offshoot long ago from Mandrake/Mandriva lineage.

Mageia 9 development is running around a half-year behind schedule with much of the release activities were originally expected to wrap up by the end of 2022. But at least here we are now in mid-2023 and the release candidate is available, which will hopefully be the last milestone before the final release and potentially putting that just a few weeks out. The Mageia developers for their part say they will release Mageia 9 when it's ready.

Mageia 9 features a smaller install size when carrying out a minimal install, its RPM package database has transitioned from BerkeleyDB to SQLite, Zstd compression is now used rather than Gzip for stage one images, an improved rescue mode, RPM 4.18 is in use, the Linux 6.3 kernel is powering this distribution release, Mesa 23.0 provides recent graphics driver support, the latest Plasma 5.27 desktop is used by default while GNOME 44 and other options are available, and there are many other updates throughout. See the in-progress release notes for more details on the forthcoming Mageia 9 release.

Those wanting to try out the Mageia 9 release candidate can find the ISOs here among their other mirrors.