OpenMandriva Rome version 23.03 is out now

The project known as OpenMandriva has released new installation images for its rolling-release edition, with the latest kernel and the latest KDE Plasma – among many other choices. OpenMandriva was the last to fork and continue the Mandriva distro when its eponymous parent company went under, meaning that it's one branch of a …

[nematoad]

A move too far?

I have been a Mandrake/Mandriva fan for years so when Mandriva went down the tube I had to jump ship.

The most mature at the time was PCLinuxOS so I went to that distro.

Having had some problems with X on my system I looked at others in the same family. I tried both Magiea and Open Mandriva and was disappointed with both for different reasons.

I have never managed to get on with RPMDrake and found that the package manager kept tripping me up. The same with DNF on Open Mandriva.

Another thing that jarred was the installation on Open Mandriva.

Being used to the Mandrake way of doing things I found Calamares a shock. Not that Open Mandriva was hard to use it just felt a bit rough in places and seems to have moved a lot further away from its origins than either PCLinuxOS or Mageia.

I might take a look at both when I have time, but if I were to chose to move distro my choice would probably be Mageia.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: A move too far?

I also more-or-less started out with Mandrake, and later with Mandriva for a while, but eventually moved over to debian. Pleased to see the 'family' are still going.

[Lars]

Re: A move too far?

Mageia has served me well with KDE and I know there are other good distros too but I stopped distro hopping years ago.

I am not all that concerned about not having the latest kernel, now running 5.15.98. I don't have the latest hardware either.

[FatGerman]

It's where I started

Mandriva was the first distro I used on a regular basis. I used to like their management tools that helped to keep you away from the command line, which really helped me get going with Linux. I think it could have actually made a good distro for normal people if it wasn't for all the infighting and forking. It's too few people spread too thinly now. I switched to Kubuntu - and realised why everybody says apt is so good, I shudder when I think about urpmi now.

[nematoad]

Re: It's where I started

I agree with you about urpmi, I could never get on with it so when I discovered that Texstar had modified apt to work with .rpms in PCLinuxOS I was delighted and for some reason the way that apt works just makes sense to me.

One good thing about most of the forks of Mandrake, I'm not sure about Rosa, is the fact that they have inherited all the *drake tools like diskdrake, harddrake and so on. In my opinion diskdrake is the king of partitioning tools and I do wish that other distros would use it.

[Baudwalk]

Odd nostalgia trip...

...for me.

I remember my sequence of main distros as: Red Hat (good), SuSE (better) which came with an impressive selection dead-tree literature, Slackware (best, but time-consuming), Debian (good enough for the lazy^Wtime constrained).

But I also recall giving Mandrake a shot. (Probably partly due to liking the old Mandrake the Magician comics.) I wonder if that was between SuSE and Slackware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Odd nostalgia trip...

I started with Slackware from Walnut Creek CD ROM's, Which I still have. Followed by SuSE which I still have the CD's, Then Corel Linux - yes you guessed it I still have my CD's. Then Mandrake through to Mandriva and then Mageia. Also used PCLinuxOS, Fedora, CentOS, But I tend to use Debian and Devuan recently.

I really liked Mandrake and its derivatives for years and switched to Debian to go back to the experience of using .deb and dpkg. Corel was Debian based and although a pain to install on 99 percent of machines once you got it on it was clean, light and fast. With KDE v1 it was close enough to Windows look and feel that my managers would come in to my training room to use it to type up documents in Star Office. They were having difficulty on the corporate Windows 2000 machines. Their difficulty was keeping documents private from a net admin that would read their confidential documents and selectively leak them. He couldn't on my Linux box as there was no access to it via his pcanywhere/stealth mode he had running on everyones desktops. So my box became quite popular with senior managers and unpopular with the net admin. I downloaded my CD's at the time but I believe some motherboard makers even tried giving it away with the pcb's for a while. Until a certain company paid Corel off to stop working on it anymore :(

[herman]

PCLOS

I’m running PCLOS on an Intel NUC. It is pretty good, quite slick and best of all, Poeteringfree.

[Mockup1974]

If I were dictator of OpenMandriva I would:

* drop the server version (everybody's going to prefer conservative, established choices like Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Alma/Rocky, SUSE) and Raspberry version (too niche)

* concentrate efforts only on ROME (main competitors: Tumbleweed and Arch)

* concentrate efforts only on KDE (which would make it quite unique already as all the big name distros either have multiple desktop options or only offer KDE as a 'spin' behind the Gnome flagship). You can still offer other DEs as community editions or to be installed from a minimal/netinstall ISO.

* try to find ways to cooperate - maybe even merge one day? - with the Mageia community. (What's the difference between the two any way?) Where you have differences (e.g. installer) I'd go with the one that's more unique to the Mandriva heritage rather than a generic thing that every distro uses.

* add some kind of roll back feature, like openSUSE Tumbleweed/MicroOS with btrfs snapshots

Even then it would still be very similar to Tumbleweed and the (now dead?) Solus. So you might want to have a clear focus on the desktop experience and beginner users. Look at what Mint, Zorin, Pop_OS, Solus have been doing. Stuff like codecs, Nvidia drivers, Flatpak, AppImage integration, all set up with one click or as a choice in the installer.

[Mockup1974]

Oh and also, to save manpower: don't attempt to build a big repo, rather get users to use the Flatpak (or even Snap). Concentrate the efforts on building a lean, bug-free, focused, rolling base system.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> If I were dictator of OpenMandriva I would:

[...]

All that sounds fair and reasonable to me.

I am not sure I agree regarding flatpak/snap though. I suppose flatpak would be less contentious.

The thing is, though, that a rolling-release KDE-based RPM-centric distro does sound a lot like PCLOS, so again, the problem becomes differentiation from that...

[Lars]

@Liam Proven

"All that sounds fair and reasonable to me."

I am not all that sure you have thought about it.

There are those who find a one party country absolutely perfect, and there are those who consider a two party country the golden standard, like the Brits and the Americans, but there are also those in more democratic countries who prefer a system of many parties and I hope it's the same with open source and Linux.

Let Microsoft represent the one party system.