Wanted to give some feedback on Rome to help others. If this isn’t the right area, please let me know (still new to this forum).
Some background: I ditched Windows back in 2024, initially to Debian Bookworm with Plasma 5. I haven’t looked back; while Linux may have its niggles I then look at the news to see what’s going on with Windows- insanity.
The reason I chose Openmandriva is down to the mindset of the people in the project. I guess quite a few here have heard of Lunduke. Essentially it feels like a lot of Linux distros now are out of their minds and the longer it went on, the more it felt like I was a hostage while using Debian. I don’t want Rust and Wayland forced on me.
The ones I was looking at were this and Devuan. In the last day I have also heard of Artix.
I chose this distro in particular because of the Xlibre support. I have used Wayland (Bookworm defaulted to it) and it caused massive issues, so I’ve been using X11 since and want to avoid Wayland like the plague.
I chose LXQt in particular because I had some performance issues with Plasma 5 and was thinking of a light weight interface to improve things.
Post-install niggle
Installing was straightforward. However, I have an nVidia GTX 1650… nVidia have a reputation with Linux.
After installing, I was getting kicked out of the session every minute or two. I had to disable the Nouveau driver and install the proprietary one to fix that (need to enable ‘restricted’ in the repo options to do that from memory).
Minor niggles
After having a stable session, I went about customising things how I wanted. I ran into some issues with this:
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I like to use a red light shift program as I tend to get headaches otherwise. Plasma has an inbuilt ‘night light’ which LXQT lacked. I tried installing ‘Redshift’ which works in the command line, but ‘redshift-gtk’ (the graphical interface version) fails to run due to incompatible Python versions (looks like Redshift is an abandoned project).
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I then tried to download ‘Gammy’ (another night light software), however there didn’t seem to be anything in the repo for it. I’ve just looked again now and found a Github project (ArtixTech / DynaGammy)- I’m not sure if that is compatible but worth looking into. At the time I hadn’t come across that.
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Trying to set ‘dark mode’ to be consistent across all windows was also not working. I tried applying the settings in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini without success. Some applied successfully, but some Gnome applications (I use Belmoussaoui Authenticator from Flatpak) were still in ‘light’ mode.
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Alt+Tab wasn’t working. I sorted that by changing the window manager to Openbox.
A more major niggle
I use Steam and LXQt doesn’t seem to agree with it. If I right-clicked on any game within my library, I couldn’t access the properties of it which is a major issue. It means being unable to set launch options, compatibility overrides, whether to use a beta versions, etc.
At that point I decided LXQt wasn’t quite there for me and re-installed with Plasma 6 (x11). I have noticed significant performance improvements on my computer even with Plasma 6, so guess my old Debian install had some issues.
Hopefully LXQt will improve with time- would be nice to see a built-in night light setting for it.