Another one here due to Lunduke, thou for different reason

Coffee break Introduce yourself
1

TLDR;
Wanted to move from Arch to something quite recent but less frequently (amount of packages) updating. Had not heard (or remember) about OpenMandriva, but did see Lunduke’s Youtube video and got interested, and now migrating to OpenMandriva ROME.

Long version:
My Linux history
For desktop I started with Slackware and Red Hat on 1990s (quite faint memories, I tried whatever was available and I was able to get my hardware to boot, but just don’t remember others than these two…). Moved to Debian on early 2000s, and had few years “side jump” to Apple’s OS X, and back to Debian and went with Debian all the way until 2012. Since 2012 I have been using Arch for desktops, with one year side step to Manjaro (well, it’s Arch just little different…) due to “native” ZFS support. I have been loving the minimalism and simplicity in Arch; install minimum bootable system and add Hyprland, Waybar, drun, some terminal, few browsers, Blender, FreeCAD, PrusaSlicer, GIMP and Steam, and I’m done :slight_smile:

For personal servers I used to prefer Debian, but these days mostly going with Ubuntu Server. At work my team and me run 220pcs of SUSE SLES for SAP applications (very similar to normal SLES, just special version for SAP) and few Ubuntu Servers.

I like to keep my desktop systems relative “clean”; I usually use virtual machines if I need to do some coding or use some of my server having needed development tools.

Why OpenMandriva?
I wanted to try something else for desktop as even in my minimal Arch systems there are hundreds of packages every few weeks when I reboot my machines. Also I have used Arch 13 years, kind of want to try something else. Even everyone cries about Arch being unstable; I have needed exactly once to boot from USB, chroot and fix broken system over last 13 years while having Arch in two desktops and 2-3 laptops. But also I have never installed 1000+1 AUR-packages (currently only yay and Thorium). Also even I love Hyprland I’ll need to wait few years and get back into it when it’s more stable - now it feels that every second time I reboot my computers I need to read some Github page and reconfigure something in Hyprland or relevant software (naturally on stable desktops e.g. XFCE I have not had any issues).

I have very little interest on downstream distros (e.g. Ubuntu, Manjaro, Garuda…) for desktop use. NixOS or Gentoo for desktop sounds really bad idea. And I don’t like Fedora, OpenSUSE or Solus, so I did have feeling like running out of options. I even considered BSD for desktop usage, but gaming (Steam) would not be feasible, and I doubt I would even get my 3D stuff working (Blender/FreeCAD/PrusaSlicer). Then I heard from Lunduke’s Youtube about OpenMandriva and I got really interested as it’s original distro, not downstream one. I of course know Mandrake, but for some odd reason I had not even heard about OpenMandriva, so I would remember. Anyways…I started to wonder if OpenMandriva ROME would be little less frequently updating/less packages to upgrade per month, but still new enough. Best way to find out is to test it, takes few years thou.

I have had minimal contact to Arch community, so I have been saved from all sort of woke nonsense. But I’m happy to hear that woke doesn’t live here. Maybe this even gets me interested getting more involved on 2026 when I’m done with large project, which is eating all my extra energy at the moment.

How it has been going this far?
I started OpenMandriva very cautiously with one laptop at beginning of January. I’m little surprised to hear people complaining about downloading process/finding ISO, I did find it very easy. Thou I would have preferred Plasma thin with Wayland, but Wayland was only available for non-thin version. I prefer Wayland version as in the past I have always suffered from screen tearing with X11. I have used KDE in the past, but not in last ~10 years, so it has been interesting to see how it has developed. Most of the things I have had change to try has worked as expected in OpenMandriva. Blender, FreeCAD etc. were new enough versions. Only thing I didn’t like this far was “bloat”; quite many applications like LibreOffice/Kwriter/etc. are installed by default, which I will never need. Luckily it seems those can be removed unlike Debian where you remove one desktop application it wants to remove whole desktop (or so it worked 15 years ago…). I would prefer approach from starting minimal and adding only the applications I actually need (=how I do Arch), but OpenMandriva way is also OK as there ain’t that much bloat in OpenMandriva. Also helps that KDE applications in general are not horrible. I find the oversimplified Gnome apps horrible [I do understand the appeal, I’m just not in the target audience…], KDE apps seems quite normal compared to those, even not as good as “normal” non-desktop specific applications. I have too little usage to “review” OpenMandriva yet, will need 2-4 years to form an opinion, which would have some actual merit.

I have now done 3 laptops and one desktop. All installations were easy and I didn’t experience any real problems. Now only my main desktop system needs OpenMandriva (still running Arch), but I’ll first have to figure out how I’m going to handle my photos, videos & documents which I have stored to ZFS-filesystem. I use heavily ZFS advanced features e.g. snapshots for incremental backups etc., so I need full rotation of backup disks from different physical locations before I want to even think about migration to BTFRS or other large changes. Only thing I know for sure that I don’t want to use again rolling release and ZFS; it has been quite painful with Arch as I always needed to wait ZFS-update so I can finally update my kernel. I’ll need to decide either to go to BTFRS (I don’t really like it…) or have dedicated ZFS-server. Both BSD or Ubuntu Server have good ZFS-support and don’t update frequently, either one of them would be good ZFS-server. I haven’t yet checked how OpenMandriva does ZFS. So some studying and decisions needed; so interesting but finding time to do everything is challenging.

10 Likes
2

That had to take a while to type out. :trophy:

You can install the slim version and add the Wayland to it. :slightly_smiling_face:

X11 to Wayland.

sudo dnf in task-plasma6-wayland --refresh
2 Likes
3

@vahonen Welcome!!

1 Like
4

Welcome to OpenMandriva @vahonen

1 Like
5

As far as I know, OpenMandriva doesn’t ship ZFS. I used mdadm to setup a raid5 formatted as btrfs, but with cow and compression disabled.

2 Likes
6

Took some time, but finally I have installed OpenMandriva to all my Linux computers. All installations went well and installation process is fast and easy.

Thanks for OpenMandriva team for great work giving us this distro!

I have just half a year usage behind me with laptops and non-primary desktop (=not much actual usage), and in my main computer still 3 weeks ago had Arch running => I can’t give any meaningful opinion yet, but short pros and cons of OpenMandriva this far below.

Pros:

  • Much less packages to update than in Arch, also less frequently
  • New enough kernel etc. to support new AMD5 motherboard (MSI PRO B850-P WIFI) and devices in it and 9060XT, also all my laptops worked fine
  • Once it has booted it works very well and fast (also on slower laptops)

Cons:

  • At boot opening the LUKS encrypted volume takes very long time (20-40 seconds, longer with slow older laptops, faster with fast desktop processor), while in other distributions it takes under 3 seconds
  • After giving the enryption password OpenMandriva asks password once even I have created user with option to not ask pw (if I don’t select that option at user creation, then I need to enter password 3 times before I can start using computer; encryption and window manager and KDE)

Not directly OpenMandriva relevant, just software selections in OpenMandriva:

  • It took some time to get used to KDE. Mainly that in Hyprland keyboard inputs go to window, which is under mouse cursor, while in KDE one needs to click the window first.
  • I really don’t like KDE wallet, but I have given up and use it reluctantly as it’s so much integrated to KDE and applications. Also disabling KDE wallet didn’t reduce nbr of times OpenMandriva asks password on boot (on other distros it’s possible to automatically login KDE without entering password as long as KDE wallet is not in use)
  • The worst KDE issue is the lack of fake fullscreen (with fake fullscreen browser with video can be set to go fake fullscreen = application thinks that it’s window is fullscreen, for example with ultrawide monitors I never want to use actual fullscreen as it leaves large black bars to sides of video, I prefer to have some browser/terminal and multitask…)
  • Biggest thing for me to learn was moving from ZFS to BTRFS, but with help of Grog (=x.com AI) it was fairly easy to learn; I asked Grog 4 questions to tell me how to operate BTRFS for someone whom knows ZFS well, and Grog was very good telling the differences. Then 4 hours practice in sandbox and I was brave enough to move my files from ZFS to BTRFS.

Very weird issue

Only real issue I had was very weird and specific, and it was very difficult to repeat. This is why I didn’t see any point to report it anywhere or ask from anywhere. Also I incorrectly assumed it was hardware issue. The weird issue: in combination of playing Steam game (didn’t matter which game, this happened with ~10 different games) in one monitor and viewing Youtube video at fullscreen with Flatpak Chrome on other monitor caused random crashes, which froze first another monitor and eventually also the other (thou mouse cursor still moved, but clicks didn’t do anything). So I had to ssh from other computer to shutdown the system (also switch to TTY didn’t work). These issued caused also some files on BTRFS volumes also to report wrong checksum.

While doing problem solving I first purchased new 9060XT graphics card to replace 5700XT, which didn’t help. As I didn’t have infinite time and patience, I went and purchased new AMD5 motherboard, 9800X3D, memory, few NVME drives and new PSU (I had extra enclosure and pile of Noctua coolers and fans), so basically totally new computer as I just had purchased the 9060XT. I was sure I have solved the issue as ALL hardware was changed&new. So I happily installed OpenMandriva and assumed issue is gone… but I was wrong, in this same scenario the issue still occurred. For problem solving I installed CachyOS and was not able to repeat the issue (I don’t remember did I use Flatpak Chrome on CachyOS).

Then I uninstalled Flatpak Chrome and replaced it by version “OpenMandriva Welcome” installs when Chrome is selected. And it seems that problem is now gone, at least I have not been able to anymore create this situation within last week. I’m still very suspicious about this and I still unmount the important data volumes before doing any gaming, as I really don’t want any more corruption to BTRFS and waste time correcting files. If the issue is actually fixed (=needs more testing than one week to gain my trust) then I maybe get brave enough to not unmount those data volumes.

7

We package hyprland.

Licensing is why we can’t offer that.

I was going to suggest this. While Chrome wouldn’t be my first pick, the repos will have the most updated binaries and rely on the libraries in our repos. We also have a repo for Brave that is enabled in the same way as Chrome. Ungoogled Chromium should also meet the majority of needs, unless you really need your profile synced to the browser.

8

I know we have Hyprland, but Hyprland is still too much under development requiring constant tweaking of config files (one of the things, which annoyed me past year in Arch). Additionally as OpenMandriva has so strong commitment to KDE, I want to get the experience how OpenMandriva is intended to be experienced.

Yes the licensing of ZFS is difficult. Living last 15+ years with ZFS has been rather annoying with Arch&Debian; Arch itself has very frequent kernel upgrades, but I was rarely able to update kernel because ZFS packages were folder older kernel. If there are further issues in BTRFS corrupting files, I still have the option to build separate ZFS-file server (if I would have time…).

Browsers - I don’t understand why one should only use one browser, specially if one is concerned about privacy. My current browser usage:

  • I use Brave for most browsing due to it’s well working adblocking features. I’m so new in OpenMandriva that I have not yet invented usage for ungoogled Chromium, but I’m sure I’ll figure out something over the time, maybe use it for example for forums/websites which need the ad-support.
  • I use the Chrome only for Youtube and Google spreadsheets. In my head if I’m logged in to google services they spy me anyways, so it doesn’t matter that much if the Chrome does additional spying of the same usage :thinking: I never use Chrome (or Edge, what is mandated to be used at work) for normal generic browsing.
  • For banking, government websites, confidential stuff etc. I use virtual server, which I always upgrade before usage and then snapshot, only after the snapshot I open browser and use bank or whatever. And when I’m done I restore the VM to snapshot taken => my own version of “immutable” distro/browser => in the virtual machine when I’m using bank etc. the browser is always started first time ever and doesn’t contain any cookies etc., and it will never be used for anything else. This reminded me that I’ll need to check how virtual machines are used with OpenMandriva, I guess that is next to be checked.
9

Because of the backend for many web services being intertwined with companies that make money from farming usage data, there isn’t a lot people can do to mitigate that. With there only being 3 browser engines and no paid product other than farming your usage data, people are the product.

So, it really doesn’t matter that much whether you use the browser on your PC, through a VPN tunnel, or on a VPS. The nature of the connection to the internet does not favor privacy or security. Your best bet it to choose one browser and use incognito on pages that farm usage data because it resets every time you open one. This greatly reduces the ability to form a matrix of data that can be used to be profitable. It doesn’t stop them from traffic sniffing, but neither does the options you provided. Similar can also be done with sites you feel need more security. Incognito doesn’t store credentials and you can keep them in whatever manager, container, document you like instead of cached on your browser.

1 Like
10

There’s a setting in KDE to enable “focus follows mouse.” I have it enabled, and it works great! You should be able open up your system settings, then start typing “focus follows mouse” in the search bar, and the setting should show up (I can’t remember, specifically, where that option is located in the settings)

3 Likes
11

zeroability I’m well aware people being the product etc. but I just don’t understand this strong fixation “one must only use one browser”-ideology. To me it would be super hyper crazy to invest on using browser in private mode (investment = time; it’s super slow to login modern multifactor authentication websites every single visit) AND then use the same single browser while trying to hide identity - it’s much easier for google/facebook/whatever to trace you and use/sell your data if you let them to read the same “browser fingerprint” from authenticated services (=they 100% sure know whom is browsing) and keep using same browser on services you don’t want to be identified. This is why I was wondering why the strong fixation to one single browser.

My “methods” naturally can’t prevent anything, slight reduction of the browser fingerprinting at max. The VM’s “virgin browser” has nothing to do with privacy, it’s just in case there is vulnerability in browser, and my “method” can only get “virus” from bank/government/etc. website whatever I’m actually visiting as the whole VM has never been used for anything else than running “pacman -Suy” before the VM snapshots are taken (yes need to change also my virtual machine to OpenMandriva…getting there slowly…)

And it seems my machine and Chrome don’t get along. Had also crash/screen freezing with Chrome from package (not from Flatpak), and this time it was just Youtube in fullscreen, not gaming at the same time, I was just working in terminal in the other monitor. Luckily no BTRFS corruption this time. Now temporarily trying Firefox as Youtube browser, and it did not crash in 6 hours, so it looks like the monitor freezing/crash is only happening with Chrome.

schappellshow Thanks I found the setting, I assumed this functionality is only in tiling window managers as it can be confusing with floating windows and alt+tab. Funny thing is that I hated it in Hyprland first, then when I disabled it “hey, this actually was pretty good, let’s re-enable it” :slight_smile: and since then I have loved the feature.

12

I’m saying, there is no such thing as privacy and security through obscurity. Feel free to do what you want if it makes you feel better. My point was that security methods and products are largely peddled to people that don’t really understand what they are buying through FUD and scare tactics. It’s important to understand that your bank uses Google services, so does the site you purchase from. Those are tied to your PII as well as several other things you think you are defeating through obscurity. The additional maintenance and procedures are not making you more “safe.” They also take more time than opening an incognito/private windows with little to no benefit.

2 Likes
13

zeroability I guess this is “agree to disagree” situation

  • You don’t agree that browser fingerprinting leads privacy issues even it’s the primary way how you are connected to your activities when you try to hide them with weak measurements (e.g. ingocnito mode). Incognito mode does just remove cookies. If we would combine the removal of cookies to changing IP address, browser resolution and other attributes, which are used to fingerprint your browser I could have little fate on incognito mode. And I refuse to believe it’s one trick pony doing it all just by enabling it. But my whole point was why voluntarily give additional data point for data collectors for browser fingerprinting if one is concerned about privacy.
  • The method how I do banking and other confidential stuff has nothing to do with privacy. It’s only making sure the browser (or OS) is not infected from any previous usage, incognito mode here don’t provide anything similar. There are zero day vulnerabilities + delay when our browsers get patched. But naturally it also works equal to incognito mode as the browser has never been started before so it won’t have cookies, but that was not the point as this was not privacy driven.

Also as irrelevant detail; my bank don’t use google services, that would be huge GDPR issue for them, but that is completely irrelevant as this had nothing to do with privacy. Also I’m not recommending my cumbersome VM method to anybody, it just happens to work well for me as I’m anyways constantly using virtual machines (e.g. I prefer to have my coding and development/test environments to have separated from my normal computer) or sometimes have even dedicated server/desktop for some specific purpose (e.g. laptop for starting/monitoring 3D printers as they are on separate fully isolated network) = I’m not trying to do every single thing in world with one workstation/browser/whatever.

14

I think we agree on more than we disagree on. Perhaps this would make its own topic for posterity’s sake. I will just leave this here and say it’s one of many tools you can add to your process to maybe reduce its complexity. Obscurity and complexity are the enemies of privacy and security.

2 Likes