End of Life means that it won't receive any more updates

Nov 21, 2014 13:07 GMT  ·  By

The Mageia 3 Linux distribution has reached end of life and the developers have announced that the updates and security patches for the operating system have stopped completely.

Mageia 3 was released back in May 2013 and it has been maintained until now. At launch, it came with a number of interesting features, although it did ship with some outdated packages.

For example, the devs integrated Linux kernel 3.8.x, but that particular branch became EOL soon after. On the other hand, Mageia was one of the distros that integrated systemd, in a period when this particular init system was not at the center of discussions.

The distributions shipped with three desktop environments – KDE, GNOME, and Xfce, and all of them were modified to make the operating system look different.

After all, Mageia started its life as a Mandriva fork and it has a reputation to protect. The developers can't just integrate the stock version of GNOME, for example. There are plenty other developers that do just that.

Mageia 3 is no more

End of life means only one thing. The developers of the application, driver, kernel, or operating system don't provide any kind of support for that particular version anymore.

It doesn't mean that users won't be able to use the system any longer, just that it will become increasingly insecure. As you would expect, the devs recommend the Mageia 4 release, which is much newer and still supported.

"As you all know, we can’t maintain Mageia releases forever. And it’s time to say goodbye to Mageia 3. After Wednesday the 26th of November, this release won’t benefit from any more security or bugfix updates."

"This will allow QA team to give more time for polishing our coming Mageia 5. So you have only one week left to upgrade to Mageia 4 if you want to keep an up-to-date system," write the Mageia devs on the official blog.

The Mageia 5 branch of the operating system has been in the works for some time and a few intermediary releases have already been launched.

The latest Mageia 5 Beta 1 was made available only a few days ago and users can test it any time they want. In fact, its makers want to have as many people as possible testing the system. It's the only way to make sure that it will ship bug-free and on time.

Mageia 3 (10 Images)

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