It's been damn-near a year and a half since the last major release of Mageia -- version 6. With that said, Mageia 6.1 was released in October of this year, however. This can feel like an eternity for Linux users, when some distributions see major updates once or twice a year. Of course, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, dear Mageia users. After all, as the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Mageia 6.1 is great.

If you are chomping at the bit for a new major Mageia release, I have good news for you -- the first beta of Mageia 7 is finally here.

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"There is still a lot of work to come before Mageia 7 is ready, a big Qt and Plasma update, fixes for MATE and more checks on 32-bit hardware as well as the artwork for Mageia 7. We are all looking forward to implementing these changes and getting all of the rough edges polished out with all of the help from the community. This release will see the return of the Classical Installer as well as the Live Images, with the standard lineup of architectures and Desktop Environments -- 32 and 64-bit Classical Installers; 64-bit Plasma, GNOME and Xfce Live DVD’s and a 32 bit Xfce Live DVD," says Donald Stewart, Mageia.

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Stewart further says, "We have also updated most of the programming languages to their latest versions, PHP was a particularly large update, going from 5.6 to 7.2. AppStream metadata support has also been enhanced, giving a much richer experience with software selection in both GNOME and Plasma through their respective software search tools, there have also been improvements to laptops with Optimus and to the ARM port."

The developers showcase the following updated packages.

kernel 4.19.6

rpm 4.14.2

Plasma 5.14.2

GNOME 3.30

Xfce 4.13.4

Firefox 63

Chromium 70

LibreOffice 6.1.3

Mageia 7 Beta 1 can be downloaded immediately here. The operating system is at a very early stage, so it shouldn't be used for normal day to day use -- there will be bugs. If you do give it a go, however, I kindly welcome you to share your experience with me in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Ranta Images/Shutterstock