Openmandriva Lx 4.0
A delighted Mayank Sharma discovers that not only is this project alive, it’s still rewriting the rules for desktop Linux – much like its progenitor.
A delighted Mayank Sharma discovers that not only is the project alive, it’s still rewriting the rules for desktop Linux – much like its progenitor.
Old-timers (Yes? – Effy) and greybeards will remember the time when desktop Linux was synonymous with Mandrake Linux (see LXF67/70). The project became too successful for its own good, and spun off a for-profit company that made the cardinal sin of laying off its founder. It changed owners a couple of times, and spawned at least one fork with each move that soon faded away from the conscience of the open source community. But we’re happy to discover and report that two independent community-based Mandrake derivatives are doing quite well. After all these years, one of them – Openmandriva Lx – has finally started to replace some of its legacy tools with new ones, without losing their ease of use and dexterity.
For starters, with the latest 4.0 release the project has switched back to rpm.org’s RPM v4 packagemanagement system. In the previous release it used the newer RPM v5 fork, which isn’t as widely adopted as the Fedora-maintained v4 fork. To complement the switch, the distro has also abandoned its classic packagemanagement tools. The Cli-based urpmi and its graphical frontend rpmdrake have been replaced with
dnf and dnfdragora respectively.
Spring cleaning
Package management isn’t the only area in which the distro has dumped its customised tools. It has also replaced userdrake with Kuser for managing users and groups, and Kbackup has been made the default backup tool instead of drakesnapshot. The distro’s fondness for the KDE desktop doesn’t end here, though. In its effort to give users a well-integrated KDE experience, Openmandriva has switched to the Falkon web browser. Earlier known as Qupzilla, Falcon is the official KDE web browser and uses the same web engine as Chromium. It also ships with an ad-block component which is enabled by default.
The old Mandrake and its many forks were known for its custom drakx graphical utilities that aided maintenance and administration tasks. These too have been dumped and replaced with Openmandriva Control
Center. The app has retained all its functionality but is more presentable and usable than its predecessor. The distro’s release notes also make a note of its custom repository-management tool for juggling DNF repos.
We feel that a ‘Welcome’ app is a must-have utility for a desktop distro these days, and Openmandriva’s is quite useful. It introduces the key features of the release and also enables you to configure key areas of the installation, flesh it out with some popular apps, and browse documentation and support resources. One thing it doesn’t include is the ability to add online accounts; you’ll have to set them up by calling upon the KDE Online
Accounts app.
Like all major releases, Openmandriva Lx 4.0 has updated apps and polished internals, with loads of bug fixes to iron out inconsistencies in code for an improved user experience. There are, however, a couple of things that stand out in this department as well. Openmandriva is one of a handful of Linux distros that prefers to use the LLVM Clang compiler, because its developers reason that
Clang offers various advantages over the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) used by a majority of projects.
Secondly, the 4.0 release is part of an even smaller group of distros with a specialised build to cater to the AMD platform. Besides the regular ISO image, the project hosts a znver1 ISO optimised for AMD Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC processors. If benchmarks on Phoronix.com are to be believed, znver1 is still slower than the likes of Clear Linux, OPENSUSE and Ubuntu.