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OpenMandriva 23.01 ROME Review

Mandriva 2007 was my first distro I installed on my pentium 3 machine. It came with beautiful KDE desktop and non-free multimedia codecs. While other major distro were still dealing with proprietary formats, Mandriva gave me full support to play my media collections. It was my first love.

Unfortunately, the company behind this distro was struggling with financial problem and the Mandriva project was officaly discontinued in 2012. As the continuation, OpenMandriva was born from the ashes of Mandriva.

Recently, OpenMandriva project build a new architecture, called znver, optimized to AMD Ryzen CPU. Also, OpenMandriva release a new version codenamed ROME, a rolling release version that offers newer update regularly. It really makes me curious because I have a Ryzen laptop and I decided to rock this new system on my Ryzen machine.

Installation Media

OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 has a 2.8 GB iso. Compared to othe KDE Plasma based distro, like Kubuntu, this is relatively small. Nice.

Installation Process

OpenMandriva ROME comes with Calamares, a universal, distro agnostic Linux installer. It is a user friendly installer with very similar interface to Ubuntu's Ubiquity. Unfortunately, there is a minor bug, where Calamares can't detect EFI partition.

However, the installation process is finished without problem. The grub installed successfully and the installation booted without any issue. 


Performance

I don't have a tool to benchmark and find detailed statistic about the performance. However, OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 znver booted very fast on my Ryzen laptop. All my hardwares work by default, including wifi, touchpad, etc.

Also, the overall desktop feels responsive and I am really happy with it.

Software Selection and Repository

OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 comes with KDE Plasma 5.26.4, Falkon browser, SMplayer, and LibreOffice 7.5. 

There is a software repository menu that offers a complete set of these following repositories: Main, Unsupported, Restricted and Non-Free. 

OpenMandriva uses dnf to install apps, just like Fedora. There is also dnfdragora, a software center to install apps easily, just like Synaptic.

Compared to other major distro, OpenMandriva software repository is fairly decent, though I am unable to find some popular apps where exist in other distro. Example, I can't find persepolis download manager in OpenMandriva repository. Because OpenMandriva is an independent distro, I can't install it manually, using other RPM based distro's binary (Fedora, OpenSuse). Maybe I have to ask OpenMandriva developer to include this popular download manager in the repository.




Issues
There is an issue installing OpenShot Video Editor with error message "Problem: conflicting requests". As a debian/ubuntu user, it's still difficult to me to solve the dependency issue in RPM and DNF system.

I tried to download the AppImage version in OpenShot webpage, make it executable, but the file can't run either. Finally, I am successfully able to install and run OpenShot in OpenMandriva using Flatpak. Thanks to Flatpak developer.

Conclusion

Honestly, I really enjoy OpenMandriva ROME. I didn't find any random error or crash, every installed app runs very well and fast. This distro will stay on my Ryzen laptop for further lovely exploration. I give this sweet distro 8 / 10.


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