The whole Mageia community is extremely happy to announce the release of Mageia 6, the shiny result of our longest release cycle so far! It comes with many new and exciting features, a new range of installation media and the usability and stability that can be expected from any Mageia release. See the Release Notes for extensive details.

Though Mageia 6’s development was much longer than anticipated, we took the time to polish it and ensure that it will be our greatest release so far. We thank our community for their patience, and also our packagers and QA team who provided an extended support for Mageia 5 far beyond the initial schedule.

Highlights of Mageia 6

The extra time that has gone into this release has allowed for many exciting additions, here are a few of the major additions and key features of Mageia 6:

KDE Plasma 5 replaces the previous KDE SC 4 desktop environment
The new package manager DNF is provided as an alternative to urpmi, enabling a great packaging ecosystem:
Support for AppStream and thus GNOME Software and Plasma Discover
Support for Fedora COPR and openSUSE Build Service to provide third party packages for Mageia 6 and later
dnfdragora, a new GUI tool for package management inspired from rpmdrake
Brand new icon theme for all Mageia tools, notably the Mageia Control Center
Successful integration of the ARM port (ARMv5 and ARMv7) in the buildsystem, allowing to setup ARM chroots. Installation images are not available yet but will come in the future.
GRUB2 as the default bootloader
New Xfce Live images to test Mageia with a lighter weight environment
While not a new feature, Mageia 6 supports over 25 desktop environments and window managers (more details in an upcoming blog post)!