[kwlug-disc] Mageia 7

[Gary Walsh]

https://blog.mageia.org/en/2019/07/01/magical-lucky-release-number-7-has-arrived

Magical (lucky?) release number 7 has arrived

Everyone at Mageia is very happy to announce the release of Mageia 7.  
We all hope that the release works as well for you as it has during  
our testing and development.

There are lots of new features, exciting updates, and new versions of  
your favorite programs, as well as support for very recent hardware.  
The release is available to download directly, or as a torrent from  
here.

There are classical installer images for both 32-bit and 64-bit  
architectures, as well as live DVD’s for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce,  
and 32-bit Xfce.

Don’t worry if you prefer another desktop, there is a huge selection  
available to install once you are online. Here is a good place to  
start if you are unsure about setting up your system. Full  
documentation is available here if you want more indepth information.

Upgrades from Mageia 6 are also supported in a number of ways. More  
information is available in the Release Notes.

Mageia 7 comes with a huge variety of desktops and window managers,  
improved support for Wayland and for hybrid graphics cards. On a more  
fun note, an effort was made to enhance gaming in Mageia, so there are  
many new upgrades and additions to the game collection.

Here are the versions of some of the major packages that ship with Mageia 7:

     kernel 5.1.14
     rpm 4.14.2
     dnf 4.2.6
     Mesa 19.1
     Plasma 5.15.4
     GNOME 3.32
     Xfce 4.14pre
     Firefox 67
     Chromium 73
     LibreOffice 6.2.3

The full list of included software can be seen in the Mageia  
Application Database.

There has also been good progress made on ARM support: aarch64 and  
ARMv7 have the core packages built and despite this still being  
experimental, most of the distribution has been built for these  
architectures.

We have completely reworked the Welcome screen to be nicer and simpler  
to follow. We hope this can help users with their first steps in using  
Mageia 7.

With Mageia 6, we introduced the DNF package manager, dnfdragora, as  
well as AppStream and the desktop software centers, along with support  
for building third-party packages in Fedora COPR and the openSUSE  
Build Service. We’re pleased to note that this will continue with  
Mageia 7! In addition, we’ve added Zchunk-compressed metadata for DNF  
and PackageKit, to enable fetching repository metadata updates so as  
to conserve bandwidth usage. For users of DNF and PackageKit on  
metered connections, this will be a great boon! For more details,  
check out the release notes. Finally, system upgrades from Mageia 6 to  
Mageia 7 using DNF are now supported! Details on the process to  
upgrade are in the release notes.

As with everything to do with Mageia, this release would not have  
happened without the help of our amazing community that gives their  
time to make everything we do possible. So, a huge hand is due to  
everyone that helped with packaging, development, testing, and doing  
QA on all of the packages and ISO’s, as well as to the translators,  
documentation team, sysadmins, artists, and everyone else that has  
helped to bring this release together. If this is something that you  
would like to be involved with, there is lots of good information  
available.

As always, please don’t forget to check release notes and errata.

Gary