I actually joined the distribution in December 12, a bit back eh, but hey better late than never 
Hi everyone!
My name is Lorenzo, and I’ve been interested in OpenMandriva ever since I started with Linux all the way back in January 2023, but i didn’t really consider it at the time since I just started out and I wanted to get both my feet in the hobby properly and gain a bit more experience before trying more exotic distros. After 3 years into it, and gaining my own hardware to finally use Linux on my own, I decided to fully give in.
Personally what initially attracted me towards OpenMandriva was the name, I don’t know why but the name is something I always found so fascinating about the distro, it’s just something so cool and unique in my opinion it sets apart from many other distros, like imagine saying in a conversation “what distribution do you use?” and saying “I use OpenMandriva” to be honest that is something I always wanted to do and now that I actually use OpenMandriva I’m happy to say I can truly say it hehe
Other than that, learning that it’s a more community maintained distro is also what interested me, meaning I could have a go at like packaging stuff not in the repos for which my contributions may be very well appreciated later on, which is something so amazing to do and it’s something that really piqued my interest on the matter.
I was inspired by marco’s post from a few months ago it caught me by surprise to see another Italian OpenMandriva user, honestly it warms my heart knowing that even in Italy there’s a dedicated userbase of such a small distro, it’s just so cool to know. So I thought I’d go figure and present myself too!
So far everyone has been running very smoothly! For being a smaller distro one may think the hardware support is subpar, but in contrast despite having relatively new hardware everything has been working perfectly out of the box, and the few issues I’ve had were solely on the software-side.
I already contributed a bit to the repos, i published two packages so far, those being Kooha and Wike, which are both Gnome apps. And yes, I’m a Gnome user heh :P. I know I know quite the contrary for a mainly KDE Plasma centric distribution, but honestly for being a secondary desktop the experience is pretty polished.
I’ll look to contribute a lot more in terms of packaging when I’ll have more time on my hands, maybe in the summer holidays.
All in all, I’m really excited to dive deeper into OpenMandriva and learn more about it the more I use it, If you have any tips and/or resources for newcomers, I’d love to hear them!
