Hi, I am also from Australia. I have been using OM Rock for a few months now. Previously I was happily using Debian for about 5 years or so, until I became aware of their involvement with the radical left wing politics. This left me unhappy with it, and also with Gnome, and I saw one of Lunduke’s videos about this topic, where he mentioned Open Mandriva.
Over the course of a few months, I tried it out on the live disk a few times until I eventually bit the bullet and changed my laptop over to it one day. The whole changeover went remarkably smoothly, and since then, it has been working very well. (With one issue with waking from sleep, but that’s an issue for another post).
I check this forum reasonably regularly when I want to know how to do something, and I noticed these intro posts. While not normally one to do them, I like the OM project, and given it is only small, I thought it might be good to give you some info on how I use it and some encouragement.
I run my own IT business in Rural Australia, mainly dealing with farmers and other businesses, I do a bit of pretty much everything except coding. I use this OM laptop for everything. So far, it hasn’t been a problem at all. This morning, I needed “IP Tool”, a Windows only program for the security cameras I install. I installed Wine, and the IP Tool installed and ran perfectly with no issues or complications. That seems to be typical of OM so far.
I have also had 2 small business clients ask me about Linux, as they are concerned about big tech taking their data, and also the AI and Cloud rubbish getting forced down their throats. Both of these decided to buy from me brand new Lenovo Thinkbooks, which I have installed OM on, along with TacticalRMM, my remote control/RMM software. This took a bit of figuring out, but seems to work well.
One of these clients has had the new laptop for a few weeks and is happy with OM, although still learning. Today they called me with an issue with the mic not working. The fix was to click the speaker icon in the taskbar, click the little “3 lines button” and change it to Pro Audio.
The other client is collecting the laptop from me shortly, and I expect they will be happy too, especially given that I can give them remote support.
I also just installed OM on 2 older desktops for a business I support, the desktops couldn’t run Windows 11, and they just wanted to use them for staff training. So far, they are happy.
So I am getting it out there into the general community a bit, with good results. Normal people seem to be increasingly getting concerned about the big tech companies, their control over us, and their alignment with the people who hate us and are attacking us.
I also use my laptop for all my personal and community use, including substantial volunteer work in the Australian freedom movement, where I depend on the laptop a lot. OM hasn’t let me down yet.
So far, my only, very slight piece of constructive criticism, (and this is subjective) is that DNFDrake and FlatDrake dont seem overly intuitive. This is a minor issue, as I set my clients computers to automatically update to avoid them needing to use these too much.
So you all have a terrific distro here. Well done! I am very glad to have found OM, and daresay I will be using it for a long time to come. Keep up the terrific work all involved.
I can easily say that with the exception of a couple/3 flatpacks I needed OpenMadriva has been a great tool. Biggest hurdle has been learning KDE (why I started using OM in the first place…)
