After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an “At last!” that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work.

And still, we chose to take our time to fix major issues and have a high quality release, without rushing it. Maybe our best release so far, taking into account the impressive work that was done on the installer, both to add new features and to get rid of old bugs.

If our “At last!” also echoes in you after months of waiting for this release, go grab it right now! While it downloads, feel free to read on and learn more about Mageia 5:

What’s new in Mageia 5

The main spotlight of Mageia 5 is the support of UEFI systems. If you are not familiar with the term, feel free to check our detailed article about it. In a few words, let’s say that most systems with recent hardware (3 years old or newer) are equipped with UEFI, so in order for our users to be able to install Mageia 5 easily on recent hardware, UEFI support was a must.

Implementing support for UEFI boot and the partitioning changes that are inherent to this new technology meant making lots of changes in our installer. It was done incrementally, fixing bugs as they showed up, and discovering new and old issues along the way. We were lucky to have a very dedicated team of QA testers for this release, and they fiddled with the installer to try to find its shortcomings on the most exotic settings. All in all, those tests spawned many fixes and new features in our installer on top of the new UEFI support: RAID support, GRUB 2 integration, changes to the partitioner…

Of course this new release is not only about the installer changes; all packages have been updated, and we did a lot of work to ensure that all packages built fine against the new toolchain in Mageia 5. Among others, you will find:

Low-level: Kernel 3.19.8, X.org 1.16.4

Toolkits: Qt 5.4.0, GTK+ 3.14.8

Desktop environments: KDE 4.14.3, GNOME 3.14, Cinnamon 2.4.5, MATE 1.8.0, XFCE 4.12, LXQt 0.9.0, Plasma 5.1.2

Applications: LibreOffice 4.4.2.2, Firefox ESR 31.7.0 (will soon be updated to Firefox ESR 38.x)

Feel free to browse Mageia App DB’s comparison page (applications only and all updated packages) to see the differences between Mageia 4 and Mageia 5. All in all, Mageia 5 contains almost 2,000 applications and 25,000 packages, all available from the official repositories.

Why choose Mageia

One word: community. Mageia is a top-notch Linux distribution entirely made by and for its community. No strings attached, no company behind it, only users who have a great time developing the distribution that they use daily, at home or at work. And as a Mageia user, you are part of this rewarding experience, and you can contribute in many different ways to make it yours.

Mageia is shaped for its users, and is therefore suitable in any environment: work, home, servers, leisure. Everything is supported directly by the community through the official repositories, out of the box. Mageia has always striven to offer a universal usage experience across a large set of desktop environments, integrated with some of the best control and administration tools available.

The Mageia 5 look

As always for the artwork, we called for contributions from the community and we received high quality proposals. We chose the starry night painted by Robert Gormly, but you’ll also find many additional wallpapers and screensavers that we selected from the community contributions.

A special thanks

This release would not have been possible without the support of our whole community, so this is a thank you from everyone to the sysadmins, the QA and security teams, the documentation team, the atelier team and the translators, the packagers, the bug triagers and the developers, and finally, everyone else for their feedback and support on forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels, as well as their bug reports and donations.

Have fun with Mageia 5!