The Magic of OpenMandriva
OpenMandriva (OM) is a unique and independent Linux distribution, a direct descendant of Mandriva Linux with the breadth and depth of an advanced system but designed to be simple and straightforward in use.
Quick Overview
Packages are built as rpms files and managed by dnf based tools like Dragora. KDE Plasma is the base default desktop environment and at the time of writing this post the classic X11 display manager has still more features and compatibility than the newer Wayland. No offenses.
Other spins install discs — or flavors if you prefer with Gnome, xfce, etc… are also available. Regards to other distro on the markets, OpenMandriva is a super quality bundle looking at their budget and resources. 🚀
Target Users
As talked on the OpenMandriva forum, the distro is a good balance of convenience and power. For example, beginners are sweetly guided during the installation process while advanced users can easily tune their settings without breaking a whole distro. And I love that. 🫶
We can’t compare in a fair way but as an image:
- Fedora would be a pure convenience distro with a strong community and a regular reliable budget. Lots of packages, lots of persons involved, etc… but the downside is you have to update the system too much.
- OpenSuse would be a pure power distro with a bold history and a heavy reliable toolset. The downside is a bunch of users might feel lost and some others might not appreciate the few breaking changes that happened over the year.
Your next Move
With the latest official release OM Lx 5, OM is back on the game. As a developer, I could install packages like MySQL Workbench or the GitHub Desktop 🥳 — which was not the case before, and even borrow some rpms from other distros. 🤫
My impression is a typical user nowadays will give up as soon as a specific package does not exist or just can’t be installed. That’s too bad. The real question with open source or “free software” is:
How much do you want to be involved in the project?
If the answer is none at all, there is no shame in using a big brother distro like Ubuntu or even Windows or Mac. 🫣 If you are not afraid, well you are welcome to share your journey or even a few minutes of your time with us.
