OpenMandriva flagship release is ROME (rolling) KDE Plasma6
It is designed to be a working, usable system and will have the most up to date packages.
OpenMandriva developers are mainly focused on what we strongly suggest to install and use for individual users.
We’d ask to help first on bug reporting ROME Plasma6, as well as to fix issues if you feel you have enough knowledge.
As you can read, it’s clearly stated that spins need community maintainance.
As of today, except for the Gnome edition, there are no dedicated maintainers nor can you expect they work out of the box.
Bug fixing is low priority too.
From a constructive, proactive point of view you are very welcome, actually we had hope for this since longtime, to maybe set up one or more groups of alternative desktops lover users and coordinate yourselves in order to get something working as desired.
This maybe a dumb question but why don’t the spins work? Are they missing necessary packages or is it a problem with missing or incorrect configs or something else? I dont know how maitaining works so this isn’t meant as a critisism just my lack of knoledge. Why can i install a server iso on other distros and then install x11 or wayland + destop manager x + desktop y and have a minimal fuctioning desktop that i can add to. Rather than fully modified spins wouldn’t a more arch approach be easier to maintain a solid base iso you can build from. For those that want something that just works we have the working isos but for those who want to customize everything we can build from scratch. Would producing more comprehensive ducumentation for this be easier than maitainig the spins?
Yes we should hopefully have somethng like that after the 6.0 release, when we will be able to make some changes (that we can’t do right now before release) starting from the cooker branch.
We inherited some things from Mandrake/Mandriva including a lot of non-technical users and people with older hardware. OpenMandriva has the tools for more advanced user to do as they wish but we do not do it for you. @bero is working of the server installers for ROME but they will require more knowledge to use.
Finally number of contributors all unpaid, part-time, volunteers is small. Time to do everything everyone else thinks we should do does not exist. Community distribution of LInux means people in the community step up and do it or it does not get done.
Having a “minimal” spin of OpenMandriva ROME where it only installs the base console and the important tools would be wonderful actually as it would give the end user as much freedom to fully customize their installation as much as possible and still have all the goodness of OpenMandriva.
Could you tell me what the specific technical goals are? What sets OpenMandriva apart? I’ve read the sales pitches on the website but there aren’t any specifics.
There are a ton of Linux distros out there. What is the OM team trying to achieve?
Don’t get things confused, OpenMandriva isn’t a new distro they have been actively building and maintaining it since November 2013. OpenMandriva started as a fork and continuation of Mandriva Linux 2011.0 with ancestral roots going back to Mandrake Linux and has long-since evolved into it’s own independent distribution.
I am not at all confused, friend. I used Mandriva 20+ years ago. I am trying to figure out the situation with OpenMandriva today, in part to figure out whether I should offer to help out.
What you may want to do is to download and install, preferably in real hardware, the distribution and use it for some time.
Feel free to ask for help should you encounter any issue not yet covered in documentation (wiki, or better the forum Resources category).
As an advanced user you will be able to solve most of glitches by yourself, but you never know.
I can’t install OM on real hardware. It isn’t properly signed and its repos (AFAIK) are not signed either. It’s not a safe situation. This was table stakes a decade ago. Not trying to be rude; just giving it to you honestly. I am running Rome in a VM without network access.
@encw you are bringing up things that you need to discuss with OM developers. The might see what you post here but there is no guarantee, they tend to be extremely busy. It can be faster to contact them on OM-Chat.
Anyone out there that believes we needs some other security measure you are welcome to volunteer to help us do that. We sincerely wish we could make everything perfect for every user, with every hardware or vm or every opinion of how things get done but we are are small unpaid, all volunteer, group. We work very hard to do what we do and to manage the resources we have as best we can.
There are a lot of areas where we can use help and we know that.
Personally if I believed the distro were in any way unsafe I would not use it. But I have been working with the people involved since OpenMandriva Association was founded, new users might see things differently.
