Mageia 9 RC1 Now Available for Download
The developers of Mageia have announced the availability of the latest RC candidate for the upcoming version of their Linux distribution, which includes plenty of updates, resolved issues, and security fixes.
The first release candidate of Mageia 9 is now available. This first look at the latest release follows the last beta release from May 2023 and has resolved several "stubborn" issues as well as included a number of security fixes and updates.
As far as updated packages are concerned, you'll find kernel 6.4.3, glib 2.36, gcc 12.3.0, rpm 4.18.0, Chromium 114.0.5735.198, Firefox ESR 102.13, LibreOffice 7.5.4.2 and Mesa 23.1.3.
As far as desktops are concerned, Mageia 9 makes available the following: KDE Plasma 5.27.5, GNOME 44.2, Xfce 4.18.4, and LXQt 1.3.0.
You'll find installation media for both 32 and 64-bit architecture. The latest release installation media has been reduced in size and is, in fact, the smallest since Mageia 4.
It's also important to note that the Mageia RPM database no longer uses the old/unmaintained Berkeley DB. In its place, Mageia 9 uses SQLite. If you're upgrading from version 8 of the OS, that database will be automatically converted.
As expected, this is still a testing release and shouldn't be used for production or your daily driver.
You can read the full release notes and download the RC1 candidate from the official Mageia download page.
