OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Released With AMD Zen Optimized Option, Toolchain Updates

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update has set sail this weekend.

This is another interesting update to this Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Linux distribution and makes some interesting design choices like using the LLVM Clang compiler over the more common GCC compiler used to assemble most Linux distributions. With OpenMandriva Lx 4.0, they have upgraded to LLVM Clang 8.0 as well as shipping various other toolchain updates as well as new releases of Rust, Go, Java 12, and more.

One of the interesting additions with OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is introducing an AMD Zen optimized version of the distribution rather than the generic x86_64 installation image for AMD Ryzen/Threadripper/EPYC hardware. The package archive is rebuilt in this znver1 optimized flavor designed to deliver better performance on modern AMD systems. I'll run some fresh OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 benchmarks soon.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is using KDE Plasma 5.15.5 + KDE Applications 19.04.1 for its default desktop experience. Powering Lx 4.0 is the Linux 5.1 kernel, systemd 242, and other up-to-date packages. For this release they transitioned from RPM5 to RPM4 and also made other fundamental improvements.

More details on OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 can be found via today's release announcement.