Mageia 5 Alpha 2, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, is now ready for testing.

The latest stable Mageia release was just a couple of months ago, but the developers are also working on a new generation of the operating system. It's been in the works for some time and the new distro features some important changes, which include updates for a number of core components.

As you can expect, this version of the Mageia operating system is still under heavy development, so it's very likely that a lot of changes will be made by the time the development cycle is completed.

“While many of us are having some well-deserved rest, the Mageia team is still on the deck and working on Mageia 5 development. This second development release is a big step towards Mageia 5, since most of the core packages have now been updated to their latest stable branches: kernel 3.15.6, X.Org 1.16 and Mesa 10.2.5 for some of the biggest ones.”

“There has also been some important work done towards packaging KDE frameworks 5 (technological foundation for KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications 5)and LxQt for Mageia 5: feel free to try them out, and don’t hesitate to report bugs or discuss them on our dev mailing list," say the developers in announcement.

You might have noticed that the developers are talking about the implementation of the new KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications 5, which are now stable. If they pull it off in a timely manner, Mageia 5 might just might become the first Linux distribution to ship with the new desktop.

Not everyone is enjoying the direction taken by KDE Plasma 5 and some consider it to be a little bit too Windows-ish, and that is not good in the Linux world. On the other hand, Mageia doesn't integrate the default implementation of KDE, so it would be interesting so see what they will be able to accomplish and what the end result will be.

Other packages that have been implemented so far are LibreOffice 4.3, MATE desktop 1.8.1, GNOME 3.13.4, KDE 4.13.95, and Linux kernel 3.15.6.

Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Mageia 5 Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.