Mageia 7 Beta Finally Rolls Along For Testing

It's been a year and a half since the release of Mageia 6 while finally the Mageia 7 beta images have surfaced.

The Mageia 7 Beta is shipping with the KDE Plasma 5.14 desktop environment, is running on the fresh Linux 4.19 kernel, provides the Mesa 18.3 3D drivers, and has a wealth of package updates compared to the state shipped by Mageia 6. Mageia 7 also offers reworked ARM support (including initial AArch64 enablement), DNF as an alternative to URPMI, and a variety of other updates. The in-progress release notes cover some of the other Mageia 7 changes.

No formal beta announcement has yet to hit the wire, but for those interested in giving Mageia 7 Beta a whirl this weekend can find the images for this distribution via their FTP mirrors for this OS whose roots trace back to Mandrake.

Mageia releases have commonly run behind schedule in recent times but at least it looks like in 2019 we should see Mageia 7.0 officially ship. In fact, according to their Wiki they indicate they hope to ship Mageia 7 ahead of the annual FOSDEM conference in early February.