The first alpha release of the forthcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now available for testing with this Clang-built Linux distribution that originates back to the days of Mandrake.

With OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 the compiler toolchain is being upgraded against LLVM Clang 9.0 and Glibc 2.30 along with a wealth of other package updates. OpenMandriva for a while now has been built with the LLVM Clang compiler rather than the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). With OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 there is now the option of having a Linux kernel image build also composed via Clang rather than GCC.

With LLVM Clang 9.0 and using the mainline Linux kernel, it's now possible for Linux x86_64 kernel builds (and prior to that for AArch64) to happen without needing any extra patches. So with OpenMandriva Lx 4.1's kernel-release-clang package is the option of having the Clang-built kernel.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Alpha 1 is using KDE Plasma Desktop 5.17.2, KDE Frameworks 5.64, KDE Applications 19.08.3, Qt 5.14, and other updated desktop packages.

More details on today's OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Alpha release via the release notes and announcement.