Mageia 8 End of Life

Mageia made it to a byte’s worth of releases when Mageia 8 was released in 2021. Mageia 8 was a very successful release which has received 21646 updated packages and thousands of security fixes, keeping it current and secure thanks to the work of the packaging, security, and QA teams. However, it is now time to bring this chapter to a close and focus on Mageia 9 and the support for both the latest software in the open-source ecosystem as well as the hardware support provided by newer kernels and other key software stacks that it provides. We hope that this will give users an excellent experience with a modern diverse open-source system. Full details of the features in Mageia 9 can be found in the release notes.

Support for old releases extends to 3 months after the latest release. We would therefore ask that users of Mageia 8 look to upgrade to Mageia 9, as support for Mageia 8 is ending with the last few updates being validated now. 

There are multiple update paths available, these include:

• Upgrading through the update applet in the system tray

• Upgrading from the command line as described in the release notes

It is also possible to upgrade or perform a clean installation from the classical installation media, while the live media can be used to test Mageia 9 or perform a clean installation. This option may be useful for users with limited bandwidth or performing updates on multiple installations. 

Please note, if performing a clean installation, all data not saved on a separate /home partition will be erased. Please check and make sure appropriate backups are in place.

If you have any questions or need some help with upgrades, assistance can be found on our forums which cover most languages or on the Mageia wiki.