OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 Released With KDE Plasma 6 But Wayland Not Mature Enough

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 debuted as stable today for this rolling release model of OpenMandriva. With the new release comes the transition to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop but the OpenMandriva developers aren't yet comfortable enough to use Wayland by default and thus the X11 session is preferred.

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 has transitioned to KDE Plasma 6 as its default desktop environment rather than Plasma 5. But if KDE isn't your cup of tea, there are also spins featuring the LXQt 2.0 Qt6-based desktop as well as GNOME 46.3.

While most KDE Plasma 6 powered Linux distributions are following upstream guidance and defaulting to the Plasma Wayland session, OpenMandriva developers aren't comfortable enough yet in Wayland. By default they are using the X11 session but they do produce a Wayland-focused ISO for those interested. In today's release announcement they explained:

"Also provided is a ROME Plasma6 Wayland ISO, however we believe Wayland still not to be mature enough to replace X11 by default for most users."

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 also adds Proton and Proton Experimental packages to the distribution to complement their Wine packages. There is also an improvement to the initial setup/welcome manager, various software upgrades, AMD ROCm packaging for open-source AMD GPU compute support, LLVM Clang 18.1.8 as the preferred compiler, the GCC 14.1 compiler is available, and a number of other package updates.

Downloads and more details on the OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 release via OpenMandriva.org.