As many will have no doubt noticed, there has been an artwork contest running for Mageia 7, and then lots of voting in the community to choose the artwork! This has all finally concluded and we will start to integrate the new artwork into Mageia 7 to get it ready for release.

Before we get to the new artwork, firstly, a huge thank you to everyone that submitting artwork, and also those that took part in all of the voting, there was a great turnout and the results were really close, an indication of the excellence of the work that our community has put forward.

Firstly, the screensavers for Mageia 7 were, as always a tour around the world and showed some excellent photography talent. There seemed to be a distinct liking for rivers this time around.

We are very proud to announce that Mageia 7 beta 2 is available for everyone to download!
This new beta comes with lots of bugfixes and updates, and it is one of our best beta releases.

Of course, there is still a lot of work to come before Mageia 7 is ready: a big Qt and Plasma update (5.15), a Gnome update (3.32 as soon it is released), and more checks on 32-bit hardware as well as the artwork for Mageia 7. For that, we will have a beta 3 set of images. We are all looking forward to implementing these changes and getting all of the rough edges polished out with all of the help from the community.

This release includes the Classical Installer as well as the Live Images, with the standard lineup of architectures and Desktop Environments – 32 and 64-bit Classical Installers; 64-bit Plasma, GNOME and Xfce Live DVD’s and a 32 bit Xfce Live DVD.

The artwork contest is now closed, firstly, all of the people that gave their time to make and submit so many excellent pieces deserve our thanks, it is really appreciated, they will make Mageia 7 look excellent.

So now we need to start voting on which of these images we want to have included, primarily for the signature background, but also as additional background and screensavers.

As we have so many images to choose, there are two votes, one for the background and one for the screensavers, in both cases you can choose up to 20 images that you like, to vote, just put an “x” in a new column next to the image you want.

It's been a year and a half since the release of Mageia 6 while finally the Mageia 7 beta images have surfaced.

The Mageia 7 Beta is shipping with the KDE Plasma 5.14 desktop environment, is running on the fresh Linux 4.19 kernel, provides the Mesa 18.3 3D drivers, and has a wealth of package updates compared to the state shipped by Mageia 6. Mageia 7 also offers reworked ARM support (including initial AArch64 enablement), DNF as an alternative to URPMI, and a variety of other updates. The in-progress release notes cover some of the other Mageia 7 changes.