I’ve only been on OMLx for about a week and half. Maybe 2+ weeks considering playing with the live iso. IMO, the distro is fricking awesome and the community is just as awesome. No problems that I can see.
But there are a few reviews here on the forums that when one reads them it is obvious that they were not written as an objective review of the distro and were obviously written with opinions already decided before even trying the distro.
I wont link to them. You can find them on your own. They don’t need any more attention.
Even though I am new here myself let me give those of you that are wanting to post a review a few tips. These tips can easily be applied to any distro and not just exclusively OMLx.
1. OMLx is not Fedora. It is not based on Fedora or any other big corp backed distro. So stop comparing it to Fedora.
Do you compare LFS with Ubuntu? No you dont.
2. If you find what appears to be a bug and it is confirmed to be a bug by one of the developers, please go report it as requested. Dont be a douche bag and act like you’re too important to do it. Because you are not.
3. If you ask a question in your review about why something isn’t in the repos refer back to point number one.
A small community distro that runs it’s own repos and doesnt leach off of larger ones resources obviosuly will only carry the packages it’s community wishes to be in the repos.
4. “They should have more desktops available during install, but they shove KDE down your throat”.
In case you didnt know how to read, KDE desktop is the flagship iso that it has chosen to support. There are other desktops and window managers a user may wish to use after install. It is not “shoving KDE down your throat”. You chose to write an objective review on a default distro. That includes their desktop, not your favorite desktop, but theirs. Not to mention that every distro has a flagship desktop.
5. Dont complain that OMLx’s version of KDE doesnt do things the default KDE way is a stupid arguement. You want the default KDE way of doing things there is KDE Neon. Dont complain about different distros customizing a desktop for their users. EVERY SINGLE DISTRO DOES THIS!
6, When one of the devs pops in on your review and explains the reason that they chose to do something differently. Remember it is not a personal attack on you. It’s them taking the time to explain what and why OMLx is different from other distros. Again, keep in mind that it is NOT FEDORA!!!
7. I would suggest not reviewing any distro from a live iso or even only using the distro for a week or two. Go for 30, 60 or 90 days. You will get a much better feel for a distro within that time frame.
If you are a YouTuber, stop doing distro reviews every single day. You are doing nobody any real world favors Not the distro and definitely not any users because there is no way possible you can give an honest objective review within 10 minutes of loading a distro.You just end up making yourself look like a tool.
8. Stop complaing about Wayland isn’t default. Wayland has been around for 15+ yrs and still is not anywhere ready of replacing X11. They cant even get basic functions working 100%. If OMLx has decided to put it on the back burner to let it cook a little more, then it’s for a reason. Wayland may work great for your personal use case. But it does not work for the thousands and possibly millions of other out there that it does not. Forcing half baked protocols and software onto the masses is a massive fail. If any of you YouTube grifters could get that through your heads the Linux community would be a lot better. But no, you would rather stall real innovation with stupid little arguments about my protocol is better than your protocol cause it’s different. Not that it works. Just that it’s different.
9. In your review dont act like you are doing the devs and the distro’s community a favor by telling them that they should be just like every other distro out there and that they should be grateful for your non-constructive, complaint filled but no real world solutions review that it’s not Fedora with the default KDE shoved down your throat.
10. Don’t post your reiview asking for contructive critism of your review. Then go on attack mode when you get the cristism.
I hope these tips help you in the future with your distro reviews. I for one am not asking for contructive comments on this but you can feel free to add your comments or tips to this list.
If you are commenting about my me and my tips. Go ahead and do that too. I might respond, I might not. I dont really care either way.
To your point number 4, Ubuntu does the exact same thing with Gnome, and Mint with Cinnamon. Even large projects have trouble with different DEs, Fedora40 or 41 had a lot of bugs in their cinnamon iso at release.
I dislike Ubuntu purely because of how much I dislike using Gnome. So guess what, I just don’t use Ubuntu. Never went to their forums to cry about only having Gnome on their installer.
@LeeTalbert to add some weight, for what it matters, I’ve been running Linux Mint in dual boot with OM but definitely removed when they dismissed the KDE edition.
wayland seems to be such a hot button issue. and have no idea why honestly. if it works for you (whoever it is) then great it works! but like anything it may not work for others so getting mad about someone saying it don’t work don’t do a damn bit of good. my personal example. wayland was ok for me under kde and hyprland. anything else was a giant nope! but that is my personal experience it don’t do me any good getting mad cause someone who uses gnome/wayland tells me it works for them.
All the people complaining about “kde shoved down their throat” I ain’t the smartest guy but I did see the “spins” page which has many other DE. Sometimes just looking can be helpful and if you can’t find it why not just nicely ask “hey I am not a fan of KDE do you have a ISO that has budgie (or whatever other DE)” and someone would point you to the right iso. I get it people like what they like but no need to flame out about it.
I would just like to say that my post was NOT a review. I had only been on OM for a few days - the post was more of a “first impressions”. Could I have been wrong about something? Sure - my FIRST impressions could have been wrong, not seeing the “spin” section in the downloads. I still feel the package choices are lacking, but it’s not an issue - I am moving on to something else. I don’t want anything to do with it after the cr4p people have been replying.
For a distro that I heard was non-woke, there are a lot of thin skinned snowflakes that get butt-heart if anyone says anything the slightest bit negative about the distro. I feel the distro is going nowhere when it cant accept any criticisms at all. Have fun!
I don’t know why you are hijacking this topic in the first place. You weren’t even mentioned in it. Other than your post that shows you know how to install and theme hyprland, I don’t really see what you are offering here. You won’t “fill out multiple package requests,” but you will write novels about why you won’t do it.
You don’t want to pay for OMLx with time, knowledge, or money.
Sounds like you are the one that can’t handle being criticized. Maybe stop projecting and trying to get pity or worship on the internet. We are not here to massage your ego.
I want to add to be clear - this is NOT just an issue with OpenMandriva. I filed issues on the Arch forums, and on stackoverflow for Linux.
NVIDIA is EXTREMELY problematic. I was running a setup with two display port monitors, one of which was connected through a HDMI → DP adapter. Every time the monitors went to sleep, the HDMI monitor would sometimes not wake up using NVIDIA + Plasma + X11 or Wayland. This doesn’t happen with Gnome, with XFCE, Cinnamon. On this same setup across multiple distros when I launched Steam the HDMI output would go nuts and reduce itself to 1024x768 and xrandr reports an absolute crazy table of resolutions. The only way to fix that is to unplug that cable and plug it back in.
To try and find the root cause, I spent a month trying multiple distros. It is a newer issue, it doesn’t happen with Plasma 5 and the older release NVIDIA drivers. If I had to guess the root cause, I’d say the NVIDIA drivers.
Amen brother… but the fact that they can’t come with anything else to criticize the distro generally means that the distro in question is pretty good lol
You think that one who does not have the time to file a few requests will take some time to RTFM?
I see that most of the invalid complaints (not referring to anyone specific) are PEBKAC.
