Test driving Mageia 8 RC

After learning that the Mageia 8 RC is available, I downloaded the live .iso and gave it a quick run.

I must say that, as a user that has been on the Mageia ship since the release of Mageia 1 back in 2010, one of the features that I appreciate from the project is its consistency and visual stability.  

Please do not get me wrong: of course I appreciate innovation!  However, non-technical users of Linux tend to get puzzled after becoming familiar with a distro just to find that developers, in subsequent releases, change the UI so much that they feel alienated by the OS.

Most of the changes in Mageia happen under the hood, so the UI has remained pretty stable from the beginning.  In fact, upon booting Mageia 8 RC, my untrained eye sees no big difference other than the updated wallpaper: Mageia just feels familiar and keeps the consistent Mandriva PowerPack UI (license, country, language, etc).   This is great as I will not feel lost when I decide to install it.

The booting is a bit faster and, soon enough, one is greeted by the Mageia Welcome window. 

I had my usb gaming headset plugged in and it worked out of the box.  I next tried the effects and everything is working fine.

Net_applet picks the wired connection without any hassle and it sees my wireless connections, so I choose one to connect.  Although the icon does not update and indicates that I have no connection, I am online.  In fact, I am posting this entry from the live Mageia RC usb drive.

So, that is the only thing that I was able to see.  No lags, no crashes whatsoever.

This looks like a solid release.  In fact, this RC really feels and behaves like a final release.

Kudos to the Mageia team for their effort!