OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Brings KDE Plasma 6 TP Option, Continues With AMD Zen Spin

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Brings KDE Plasma 6 TP Option, Continues With AMD Zen Spin

OpenMandriva developers today formally announced the release of their rolling-release OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 Linux OS installation images, which are also being treated as a release candidate for the OMLx 5.0 non-rolling distribution variant. Making OpenMandriva ROME 23.08 more exciting is that they are now offering separate install media as well that features the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment in its current experimental state but is being offered by OpenMandriva as a "technical preview" around the future direction of the desktop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenMandriva-ROME-23.08

[panikal]

I think a lot of us toured Mandrake especially when Redhat switched to the enterprise model and spun off Fedora, it was a decent system with a nicely integrated control panel, and a lot of package support.

But it wasn't dev-friendly enough like crunchbang or user friendly enough like ubuntu, and fedora slowly improved...and it competed in the same 'commercial' desktop RPM niche as Suse or at least it *felt* a lot like suse to me.

Its interesting to see its still around, curious if anyone who has used it can compare it and knows what its strengths are vs something like arch-based systems.

[sophisticles]

Will probably give this a try as a live-usb and if it seems decent will try it on my Ryzen 1600 desktop.

I don;t think i would use it on my main desktop because I hate KDE and any distro has to be dual boot friendly with Windows and I don't believe this one is.

[Sonadow]

Will probably give this a try as a live-usb and if it seems decent will try it on my Ryzen 1600 desktop.

I don;t think i would use it on my main desktop because I hate KDE and any distro has to be dual boot friendly with Windows and I don't believe this one is.

I don't really like KDE, but it and Gnome are the de-facto graphical desktop environments that make up desktop Linux. Any distribution I use has to ship with relatively up-to-date versions of of both environments at the time of release, because I make it a point to install both for maximum compatibility under Wayland. If something has problems in Plasma under Wayland, chances are that problem won't exist in Gnome and vice versa.

If you want something with Mandrake / Mandriva ancestry there are options available. Mageia is one of them, if you don't mind the fact they are understaffed and Mageia 9 is running late.

There's also ROSA and ALT from Russia and both have very close links to their Mandriva roots, but it might be a good time to wait for newer releases. ROSA 12 is now up to 12.4 and ALT is now on p10.3 after at least two years on the same major release, so their packages are getting old. And while some things I can compile from source for newer version, others, like the graphical desktop environment and their respective graphical toolkits i'm not willing to waste my time trying because of their complex dependency relations. So i'll wait for ROSA 13 and ALT p11 to be released.

[sophisticles]

There's also ROSA and ALT from Russia and both have very close links to their Mandriva roots,

I would not use anything from Russia, China, North Korea or any place similar to that.

As I have mentioned I worked for 2 medical labs and when Covid hit, our networks were getting hammered with intrusion attempts from IP ranges in those countries.

I just can't trust any distro that originates there.

[Sonadow]

I would not use anything from Russia, China, North Korea or any place similar to that.

As I have mentioned I worked for 2 medical labs and when Covid hit, our networks were getting hammered with intrusion attempts from IP ranges in those countries.

I just can't trust any distro that originates there.

Each to his own.

And IP addresses can be spoofed. If I wanted to attack a lab you work in, will it make sense for me to use an obscure IP from some god-forsaken country in the world or to simply piggyback on an IP from the world's most convenient three scapegoats?

[sophisticles]

Each to his own.

And IP addresses can be spoofed. If I wanted to attack a lab you work in, will it make sense for me to use an obscure IP from some god-forsaken country in the world or to simply piggyback on an IP from the world's most convenient three scapegoats?

I'm not talking one IP, I'm talking tens of thousands of computers with IP address ranges originating in one of those 3 countries attacking our network. At the larger lab the attacks were significant in size and scope that the FBI was involved.

It was confirmed it that at least one of the intrusion attempts was a state actor.

Lastly, spoofing an IP is not as easy as you seem to think it is and I am not sure what you mean by "piggyback on an IP".

[Sonadow]

I'm not talking one IP, I'm talking tens of thousands of computers with IP address ranges originating in one of those 3 countries attacking our network. At the larger lab the attacks were significant in size and scope that the FBI was involved.

It was confirmed it that at least one of the intrusion attempts was a state actor.

Lastly, spoofing an IP is not as easy as you seem to think it is and I am not sure what you mean by "piggyback on an IP".

I use the term "piggyback" because you are basically using another party's legitimate IP for whatever purpose you may have and letting the poor sap receive the response instead.

And there is good reason to suspect the accuracy of anything confirmed by any of those three-letter agencies especially with their track record.

While you were getting hammered by intrusion attempts from IP ranges that supposed to originate from those three countries, at least two of these countries (Russia and China) also reported sustained intrusion attempts by foreign IPs on their sensitive infrastructure during that period. So by that logic, is every single piece of software produced by countries outside of Russia and China also suspect?

[Off-topic portion starts here]
Lastly, China was the first country to be hit with Covid and literally had four months to analyze and understand the virus before the rest of the world starting experiencing their respective first waves. Assuming they were out to steal covid data, they are in fact the party with more intimate knowledge about covid than other medical labs situated all over the world, thanks to that four months headstart in analyzing the virus. And China, Russia and the DPRK are literally neighbors and are friendly towards each other, so sharing of Covid research and analysis data among the three countries is practically guaranteed. Why will they need to target other countries for that?

Furthermore, China's vaccine efforts were focused on the traditional inactivated virus method, not mRNA as championed by the rest of the big pharma corporations, thus those countries' data has even lesser value to China. If anything, the inverse is more likely; other state actors have more motivation to try and gain access to China's early and ongoing analysis of Covid.
[Off-topic portion ends here]

[joncr]

I would not use anything from Russia, China, North Korea or any place similar to that.

.

Mandriva was based in France. As far as I know, OpenMandriva is, as well. Mandriva went bankrupt more than 10 years ago. OpenMandriva took over the distribution in community-supported mode. Rosa and Alt are Russian derivatives of the original Mandriva. All 3 are separate project/businesses. It's worth remembering that Linux code is produced and share globally.

[Estranged1906]

Interesting how OpenMandriva keeps pushing out releases while Mageia 9 isstill not out after such a long delay. Does OM have more developers? Or just a lower scope (e.g. no GNOME, less testing)?