OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha 1 Ships With RPM4, DNF, AMD Zen Optimizations

While a few months back there was what ended up being a test version of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha, for Christmas this distribution that tracks back to Mandriva/Mandrake is out with their first official alpha release.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha 1 is powered by KDE Plasma 5.14.4 with KDE Frameworks 5.53, ships with LibreOffice 6.1.3 and Firefox 63.0.3, and has a wide variety of other updated packages. Under the hood they switched from RPM5 to RPM4, added DNF as the software package manager, and their package collection has been rebuilt using LLVM Clang 7.0 as their new default system compiler. OpenMandriva Lx continues to be one of the few Linux distributions using the Clang compiler default where possible rather than GCC.

Also unique to OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha is they are offering a specialized "znver1" build of the operating system that is specially tuned for the current AMD Ryzen/EPYC processors. The developers report that this version outperforms the generic version but without providing any specifics; I'll add it to my TODO list for carrying out some benchmarks between these builds soon.

With OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 they also completed their AArch64 port and with this current alpha are supporting the Raspberry Pi and DragonBoard 410C hardware.

More details and download links for this long overdue OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Alpha 1 release can be found via OpenMandriva.org.