After I watched his video, I had to try it. I settled on Rome. I have an ancient ThinkPad T530 gathering dust, so I decided to revive it. I tried to install Rome on an old, existing Mint partition, and it failed. I erased the partition using GParted and let Calamares set up the partitions, and it went fine the second time. I’m really enjoying it so far. I’m trying to provide useful feedback for the devs, but there’s not much to talk about. Everything works so well on my vintage hardware (i7-3250M@3.6GHz, 1600x900, NVIDIA 5400M, 16GB, cheap SSD) it’s almost boring. The only thing remarkable about Rome so far is how fast the flatpaks install! I’m used to creepy-crawly slow Flathub. How did you guys speed it up? Anyway, I’m a happy camper. Rome is neat, clean, & minimalist. My geriatric laptop runs faster than a scaredy-cat. I haven’t tried to install my printers yet. If that goes sideways I’ll post an update. Thanks a ton for the fun & interesting OS. Good job!
Welcome.
Don’t hesitate to ask questions.
Enabling Avahi could help with printers, before you get started on them.
I confess I did not read any documentation ahead of time. I’ve been distro-hopping since 2018, and my pattern is to install it first, screw it up, wallow in frustration, and the then read the distro Wiki to get it working.
That’s an option too 
Welcome! Lunduke has taken the blame for many of us recently.
Lunduke sent me here too 
Anyway, I did a few test installs on various systems (Ryzen 3, Thinkpad X201, Lenovo “something” with Ivy Bridge) to get a feeling of the system. I also happened to find relatively recent Acer X314 and decided to turn that into fully fledged OM machine. I ran into a weird install issue, but I was able to overcome that and I am now using the machine instead of my regular Win10 rig.
So far, I am impressed. I used Linux regularly in times of kernel 1.x (hi SlackWare!) but it wasn’t ready for daily use. I tried it now and then (I am positively sure I had Mandrake 8.x CD) but I wasn’t convinced. With recent Lunduke rant/praise, I thought it’s time to give Linux another try - and as I said, I am really impressed. I mostly play games and do some embedded development, and I didn’t run into problems with that. I can use Arduino, sigrok and KiCad. With Steam client and Lutris, I can play games (World of Tanks, Fallout 4, Deus Ex), and there’s decent web browser.
KMail sucks, I am sorry, I had to install Thunderbird. I am still struggling with SMB mount (good to see some things never change:) ), creating swap manually was a nice reminder of old days, however, I am very positive and I am still considering to install OM alongside Win10 on my main system soon.
Good job, OpenMandriva team, I do appreciate your work! Thanks!
Yeah, the install process is so fast I thought it actually failed!
@Kubik I thought the same thing.
I’m here because of Lunduke. I installed on a old tower. I don’t even remember what it is, and really can’t be bothered to crawl behind it to look. I’m used to Ubuntu and Debian, so this is a change. But I am dedicated to making it work because I have pride. I am offended by people who are offended by me, and I am here to hasten the demise of the crap they are trying to destroy.
Welcome to OpenMandriva! I blame Lunduke as well. Haha.
Another Lunduke referral here. Long time linux user, mostly debian/ubuntu, decided to give OM a try, now have it on my laptop, my kids laptop, and once we unbury it my wifes laptop as well. Feels a lot cleaner than Ubuntu.
BTW, is there a server version of OM or is it mostly focused on desktop?
Welcome I also decided to install OM following Lunduke’s video. I’ve tried many distros (Mint, Solus, Ubuntu, Mx Linux, Manjaro, Fedora, PopOS, Nobara…). My main objectives when looking for a distro are: simplicity, stability but with very recent packages for gaming, simple installation too (thanks Calamares). I’m installing it on my main computer and I need to be able to easily do multimedia, simple video editing, office automation, Internet and above all gaming.
I’ve been using Linux mint for a long time (adding custom kernel and mesa via ppa) and also Solus (which is also an excellent distribution). I really wanted to state my opposition to all the current DEI drifts and wokism… The Solus developers don’t really have a position on this, but I used to like using gnome desktop… Now i’m on KDE for same reasons
Honestly, I was about to try out CachyOS, which seems to be another excellent distribution, particularly unbeatable for gaming, and what really made me change was OM’s CLEAR stance on DEI issues, etc., and its firm opposition to all the sectarian deviances mentioned by Lunduke in his video, which made me install OM. So bravo to you OMA, you’ve got balls and I like that!
Having OM on my main machine since Lunduke’s video, I have to admit I’ve been surprised by the speed, simplicity, excellent gaming performance (thanks MESA) and, above all, the excellent community where you’re immediately made to feel welcome, with members who don’t look down on you. People who develop and maintain this independent OS from the heart, volunteering on their own time. Bravo to you, tomorrow’s world will be exactly the way you do it.
As I explained in another post, the energy that emanates from OMA made me want to contribute by doing the French translations. I did so with equal pleasure and conviction. I’ve never posted on other distros’ forums or chat rooms either… you’re the first, so pleasant is the exchange with the community. To conclude and salute your work, I’d like to quote you:
You can’t bring down a system by fighting it, but by proposing a safe and healthy alternative, where people will come by mutual adhesion.
Many thanks to you
As far as i know nothing official yet. There is only a Cooker server image for testing available.
https://abf.openmandriva.org/product_build_lists?utf8=✓&product_build_list[status]=&product_build_list[product_name]=server&product_build_list[product_id]=&commit=Search
Same experience as others as to reason for coming here.
I have a lab made up of several second hand zbooks, a zbook for more desktop use that I’m on now, a HP proliant microserver and a gaming desktop that I would say has been cobbled together from parts over about 15 years but I think the only thing left from that era might be the case.
I put rock with gnome (due to familiarity) on the desktop zbook as a trial for all the others and have been very happy with it so far. There were a few things to get used to:
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Learning about the installer and partitioning system. I couldn’t get it to remove the old partitions so just fdisked them away, rebooted and tried again. Might need to RTFM before doing the next one.
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Some services aren’t enabled by default on install. Took some getting used to but thinking about it I prefer this way and will come in handy for the servers/lab zbooks as I don’t want anything unnecessary sucking up performance or watts.
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The bluetooth manager wasn’t there but only too a moment to install and work out. Happy with it not being there by default. It now works as needed for bluetooth ear buds.
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I got virtualisation going quickly and painlessly. Only confusion was that the kvm packages didn’t have qemu as a dependency. Just installed it, restarted libvirtd and everything was good. Only confusion was really around the iptables requirement for network setup. I need to RTFM on firewall management options. My first linux job was related to developing a firewall manager so there is a bit of nostalgia around iptables but I’m sure there are more user friendly options available.
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I struggled with the provided nvidia drivers. I now suspect it was because I didn’t install the 32 bit package. I just threw on the vendor provided one. Soon found out about clang instead of gcc, installed the package and all was good. Bounced the laptop and glxinfo showed the vendor driver.
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At this point I took the time to get switcheroo going to save the power bill/battery life and prevent the laptop from melting through my lap. It now runs quiet and cool most of the time with the “Launch using discrete graphics card” option on the app launchers. For those not familiar, switcheroo allows you to prioritise one graphics card as default then use a different one on demand for certain apps. In this case, intel is fine for day to day tasks and use the nvidia when more horsepower is needed.
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All my normal flatpak apps are there so user experience and steam are as I am used to.
All in all, happy with how it is going. I’ve been using it for probably over a week now with no issues. This laptop previously ran centos and had some bugs I never sorted out that aren’t present in rock (moving a flatpak brave browser window to a new virtual desktop would crash brave in centos).
The only barrier to converting the rest of the fleet is shuffling vms and backing up files between the other hosts. And sending outage notifications to the wife and kids of course.
My thanks go out to the OM team for creating a fine distro for us to use.
And to Lunduke for helping us find it.
There is a whole bunch of the internet that was crying out for this.
I took a look at CachyOs as pretty much the first thing that I was curious about, their HW detection tool, is written in Rust… I would not say it’s a red flag, but it’s a warning.