I’m a sociologist and educator, currently serving as principal at an elementary school. My Linux journey started with Conectiva, followed by many years using Mandriva. I also explored PCLinuxOS, Mageia, ROSA, and Fedora—but Mandriva has always stood out.
Now, I hope to contribute to OpenMandriva, especially in the education sector, continuing the legacy of Mandriva through open and accessible tools for learning.
Welcome! We are happy to see you here. We hope you will make this your home.
Fun to see someone here from Conectiva side of things, then Mandriva. Welcome! Do you have programs for the kids to learn Linux/OpenMandriva in the computer labs?
That is a great question.
Are those programs available? As flatpaks? What kinds are hardware do you have?
"Thank you! Not yet—we don’t currently have specific programs for teaching Linux or OpenMandriva to students. Our computer labs are mostly used for accessing online platforms, which is a bit limiting. However, we do have some autonomy. I’m the new principal at a public school in southern Brazil. The labs run Linux Mint, and each classroom is equipped with an Intel NUC, also running Mint. Since taking on the role this year, I’ve begun a gradual migration to OpenMandriva Rome. Now, I’m engaging my team in conversations about its benefits
In my earlier message, I was referring to educational programs. Some of them are indeed available as Flatpaks. However, more recently, we’ve often chosen web-based tools for practical reasons. Personally, I find Flatpak very useful for media applications like VLC or SMPlayer, especially due to codec support.
For educational purposes, I strongly recommend for my teachers the KDE Edu suite—programs like KAlgebra and KWordQuiz are excellent for student engagement and learning.
As for hardware, our labs currently use Intel i3 12th-generation desktops, while the Intel NUCs in classrooms are Celeron-based and we’re testing how well OpenMandriva Rome performs in some machines"
My point being that we most likely don’t have any of what you need as far as repo packages, BUT our devs do package requests. As a small team, they don’t do them overnight, but they do work on them. You might want to talk to @bero as to possibilities.
I understand your point. For us, KDE Education apps cover most needs. They’re great for sparking students’ curiosity and make learning more engaging. For more specific cases, Flatpak works well. As I said before, most of what we use is web-based. It’s boring but…
Super neat that you are at least using Mint, and more fun also that you are migrating some of them over to OM Rome. Almost wondered if you might go to Rock for an educational setting, but Rome has been super stable for me so probably a moot point. Love seeing a distro such as ours make it into an educational setting and have young eyes acclimate to seeing it.
I also didn’t know that KDE had educational tools, I’ll have to explore those for my little humans.
Well WELCOME back to the OMLx world! Very glad to have you here and I hope it brings a great deal of happy nostalgia back, and great up-to-date software as well 
Then you definitely want to bookmark and/or subscribe to this topic
ROME major upgrade expected
Worth of considering IMO.
Yes we have a lot of them available in our repository.
In OM-welcome there are 2 tabs Educational and Kids
OpenMandriva Welcome | OpenMandriva wiki
Feel free to suggest if you find something important missing there.
I really love it that OMLx focuses on modern software for the advanced users, and augments that with a comprehensive OM Welcome app that opens at login.
What a great way to bridge newcomers to a distro that will never limit the user as they progress.
(said as a newcomer myself)
I submitted a request for Tux Typing a few days ago. My son needs it.
@sez11a Consider using Flatpak.
I have a positive feeling that Tux Typing will get packaged for the repos.
I should speak a bit more in depth on this topic.
Our leadership would prefer to package things locally, so that we know what is in them. Flatpaks are good. Repo packages are better.
Also, and this is HUGE, we have recently had several new users here who have jumped in with both feet. They are in the Cooker group and they are packaging and maintaining packages. @sez11a is only one of several, and I am quite proud of all of them for their efforts. Well done folks! 
Welcome!!!
Thanks. I am using some Flatpaks, because there was no other option. I don’t mind running stuff like Slack (which mostly just talks to its own service) on Flatpak. But sometimes Flatpaks don’t even work (I’m looking at you, Ultimaker Cura). But I’d like to avoid them for apps that could run on the bare metal.
My son is 11. I got my 77-year-old mom a new laptop (well, new to her; I like to buy 1 year-old Thinkpads on eBay to get a good performing machine at a decent price), and kept her old one. This machine is a bottom-of-the-line HP she got at Staples probably about a decade ago. I threw OM Rome on it as a test in preparation for my own switch to OM on my work machine in April.
I’d like my son to be able to use this laptop as he learns both how to type and computing in general. Maybe Tux Typing inside the Flatpak sandbox will work well on it; I don’t know. But I’d like to get as much performance out of this thing as I can.
I guess what I’m saying is that philosophically I think Flatpaks are great for company-supported apps (i.e., just about anything Electron-based), open source or not open source. These companies can make one binary for Windows, one for Mac, and one for Linux, and they’re all first-class citizens. But for open source apps whose code is available, I think they should be packaged for the distro and run natively.
@WilsonPhillips Thanks for the shout-out, but I haven’t really done much yet except for submit package requests. I need a little help navigating the process. I do have an upgrade for Syncthing and a package for Vifm compiling and packaging (and running) locally, and I will submit them as soon as I figure out how. And then I’ll be happy to document the process so it’ll be easier to contribute for the people coming in the future. 
I’m currently serving as principal at an elementary school.
The labs run Linux Mint… Since taking on the role this year, I’ve begun a gradual migration to OpenMandriva Rome. Now, I’m engaging my team in conversations about its benefits.
How did this conversation go? What plays in my head is making me laugh too hard:
Principal Tamaki: “You’re probably wondering why I called you after hours into this meeting today.”
Teacher: “What seems to be the pressing issue, Principal Tamaki?”
Principal Tamaki: “Well Señora Grundle, it appears that the computers on the Computer Science Lab room is running Linux Mint instead of OpenMandriva Lx.”
Teacher: “Okay…”
Principal Tamaki: “The issue is that Linux Mint is not based and I only want the best OS for the kids. Tell Randy the IT guy to fire up the ISO USBs and blast the hard drives as soon as possible.”
