NVIDIA Optimus laptop users rejoice, Mageia 8 now includes improved support, thanks to an upgraded graphics stack that includes Mesa 20.3.4 and X.Org Server 1.20.1. This upgrade improves both the AMD and NVIDIA GPU experience with the platform. For NVIDIA users, there’s the new experimental mageia-prime configuration tool that makes it possible to get the most out of your NVIDIA GPU.

But the new release isn’t all about the graphics stack. Anyone who begins Mageia 8 with a live instance will see faster performance, thanks to the inclusion of Zstd compression on the base file systems, and better optimizations for hardware detection. NFS file system support has also been improved, with added support for NFSv4.

Mageia also includes a new version of RPM (version 4.16.1.2) which offers a number improvements, such as automatic SSD detection and optimization, filesystem sync at the end of transactions, SHA256 digest added to gpg-pubkey headers, support for meta dependencies, and parametric macro generators. Overall RPM should be considerably faster, thanks to several optimizations. Mageia also ships with DNF version 4.6.0.

Finally, Mageia 8 ships with the Linux Long Term Support kernel 5.10, which gives EXT4 and Btrfs file systems a performance boost, faster hibernate/resume functionality, and a number of other improvements.

Users can download three different versions of Mageia:

• KDE
• GNOME
• Xfce

Find out more about the latest Mageia release from the Official release notes.