OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 Rolling Release Arrives

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 Rolling Release Arrives

OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 is now officially available as this Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution in rolling-release form...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenMandriva-ROME-23.01

[Estranged1906]

Does anyone have experience with OpenMandriva? Is it still as good compared to the competition as Mandrake was back in the day? How does it compare with other derivatives such as Mageia and PCLinuxOS?

A rolling desktop with KDE sounds nice, I think the only big names doing it are OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS, but OpenMandriva is concentrating on KDE alone, which should in theory mean it's the most polished.

[xpris]

Does anyone have experience with OpenMandriva? Is it still as good compared to the competition as Mandrake was back in the day? How does it compare with other derivatives such as Mageia and PCLinuxOS?

A rolling desktop with KDE sounds nice, I think the only big names doing it are OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS, but OpenMandriva is concentrating on KDE alone, which should in theory mean it's the most polished.

It works really well. KDE Plasma itself is the main desktop and is probably polished to the maximum.
The ROME release (rolling) has been tested for a long time in a way open to everyone but without announcing it outside of own forum. Now it's officially released.
ROME are fresh versions of core packages such as qt, plasma or kernel and kernel-rc, mesa, nvidia, python, systemd and etc.
Packages are compiled with the Clang 15 compiler and use LTO optimization by default and many of them also use PGO.
For users of AMD Ryzen processors, there is a specially optimized architecture available as a separate ISO called znver, which for AMD is the same as ClearLinux for Intel.

As for similar distros like PCLinuxOS or Mageia, I will say that I don't use pclinuxos but until recently I used mageia. And I can confirm that there is a big difference in favor of OpenMandriva. Both the Plasma5 desktop itself is better refined, but also package versions are updated on a regular basis and more often than in Mageia. Of course, that doesn't mean that I'd advise against mageia completely, because it's a "fixed" release, so a cutout, and after its release, they stick to a similar package database for over a year or two without updating them too much (except for necessary things or CVE fixes). Whereas OpenMandiva ensures fresh packages all the time. Is it possible to choose a package manager like dnf or dnf5 or known from opensuse - zypper.
Looks great, I think it's worth checking out.

[Estranged1906]

Had some more look and it does look neat. Flatpak is in the repo for otherwise missing packages. What I couldn't see is some kind of snapshot & rollback feature like Tumbleweed has (btrfs + snapper). I think this would be very important for a rolling release if you're using your computer for actual work and need your OS to be reliable.