How do you use OpenMandriva?

Coffee break
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How do you currently use OpenMandriva? Baremetal or VM? Daily driver or just a novelty to play with? Standard Plasma desktop or some obscure window manager? Gaming PC, home server, glorified web browser? What does your use case look like?

I started using OpenMandriva sometime in 2024 on an old HP mini-PC to run my TV. The goal with it was to bypass the incredibly slow SmartTV interface and typing with a TV remote. I used to enjoy trying out every distro I could find, and at the time OpenMandriva was the next one on my list. I remember wondering why it wasn’t running into random issues after several months of uptime and assumed it must be rebooting periodically by itself, because I had a Fedora install and a Mint install that would start misbehaving if I went too long without a reboot. Well, fastfetch said the uptime was into the hundreds of hours. Wow! So, I moved my laptop, gaming PC, and jellyfin server all over to OpenMandriva and haven’t looked back.

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I use it for just about anything you described here, but I also use it to make packages, and test it for problems.

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I am using OM Cooker on my desktop PC, which is widely used for much everything - programming, gaming, internet, music etc. I am also a HAM so my pc is used for ham radio communication and controlling radio equipment. I have also a couple vm’s with OpenMandriva for testing purposes and on my work notebook vm, because I need to have an Ubuntu installed there and still want to use OpenMandriva on it ;). Still I am dualbooting windows 10 on my desktop for software (Ableton Live, Canon DPP) and games (EA Battlefield Series which is not working on Linux yet). I have my home server with CasaOS and Jellyfin, Homeassistant, OpenWebRx running on debian Trixie - but maybe I will migrate it to OpenMandriva too.

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I’ve gone all-in at this point, at least as much as I can. My work machine daily driver has been on OpenMandriva Rolling the longest. I switched in April of this year. Since then, I’ve installed two aarch64 servers running on Libre Computer machines: a LePotato and a Renegade. The LePotato is a Syncthing server I had to rebuild because it corrupted its microSD, so I figured, why not install OM on it? The Renegade runs NextCloud for my family.

This past summer, my wife ran out of space on her laptop, so I bought her a new 2TB NVME, installed it, and installed OpenMandriva on it. Now that the UM has happened, she’s back on her beloved Thunderbird email, which she’s used since the early 2000s. The GMail interface was really hard for her to take.

Also this summer, I installed OpenMandriva on an old laptop for my 11-year-old son, so he could start learning to type and learning how to use a computer. He’s also enjoying Xonotic. :grinning_face:

Finally, on my personal daily driver, I installed Cooker last month because I was running into problems with putting the laptop to sleep on Endeavour OS. That issue, unfortunately, seems to be a kernel issue, so it hasn’t gone away, but I am glad to be on OpenMandriva almost completely consistently across my and my family’s machines.

I have three other machines OpenMandriva has not yet assimilated. One is the main backup/file/Syncthing server, also running on a Libre Computer Renegade with ARMbian (its default distro). I don’t want to rebuild that box until I have to. Another is our “jukebox” machine that’s just an old laptop hooked to some nice speakers for playing music and showing family pictures. That one’s still on Manjaro. It’s working, so I’m in no rush to re-do it, but it is irritating, because it’s really just a utility machine, and it wants updates too frequently. And finally, when my daughter graduated from high school in 2023, she got a Thinkpad. At the time I was an Arch guy, so she got Manjaro (which is what was on my wife’s machine pre-OM). She doesn’t want me to touch her computer, so I’m guessing she won’t get OpenMandriva until that thing dies.

For me, OM has become my default go-to Linux, and it’s only a matter of time till it’s installed on everything.

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In baremetal and VM by using a keyboard & mouse, with occasional usage of usb foot pedals. :sweat_smile:

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Originally just used to it give an 8gb soldered RAM Thinkpad some new life, but I’ve really grown to like it. The rolling release is a big part of it, not a fan of reinstalling just to get shiny new things. The packages are way more up to date than linux mint and other ease of use distros and the fact their devs don’t openly express hate for everyone that isn’t a striped-socked, unwashed autist is refreshing. It works nicely, includes lots of things I’d want, the maturity to not constantly hate on GUI options and political neutrality, that’s the bottom line. Way less toxic than other distros userbases. Now experimenting on making it my daily driver. Having some problems with proton and wine but we’ll see what can be done.

TL;DR → great package of software with good perks. Web-browsing, experimenting and one day it will be a daily driver.

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Running OMLx Rock baremetal on a Dell Latitude (for the children) and Dell Precision for my personal laptop. I am forced to use Windows at work (if I need Linux for personal reasons, OM in a VM), so I nightly drive OM for software development and personal needs. I was delightfully surprised at how up to date and stable the packages are, if it wasn’t for the reminders, I would forget to update. I recently updated the family laptop after 2 months, and it was a breeze. Even though that was the case, there were no issues, failures, random restarts or bugs.

Regaring the desktop, I wasn’t a big fan of KDE being the default at first, and I was happy using Wayfire for a month, and was planning to rice it once I completed a project. However, there were some conveniences missing and after reading a reply from zeroability, I decided to give KDE one more chance. Verdict, KDE is solid and let’s you get stuff done. The devs put a lot of effort into it and it shows. I was even able to find my keyboard layout (3L) without any rigmarole.

My family uses OMLx for gaming, web surfing and a few office related tasks. I use it for software development, learning and research. I was multi-booting Parrot OS, Windows, FreeBSD and OMLx, now I can’t remember the last time using anything else but OM. I may just overwrite the entire SSD once the next major version releases. I was planning to install Debian 13, until I saw Lunduke’s video, and quickly switched to OMLx. A decision with no regrets.

I also plan to setup some LAN gaming with me and my children using OM in the near future.

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Actually using it like you did OP - as a TV box/HTPC on an old HP EliteDesk G3 SFF. Have a nice little Rii compact kb/m on the sofa. My old Sony Bravia is quite nice as a big monitor, so I tend to just use it as my main desktop PC too. Beats sitting at a desk.

I was trying to get GhostBSD working for this purpose. Unfortunately the Intel driver wouldn’t work for the HD 530 chipset, so jittery playback, and my WiFi appeared unsupported. And just other clunk, like having to keep switching audio out back to HDMI. Came back to OM a few days back & it has been a dream!

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I have several devices running OpenMandriva.

Gaming PC - rarely plays games these days, mostly just emails and paying bills. Plasma6 with both xlibre and wayland

home server PC - NFS shares, jellyfin, immich. Plasma6 xlibre

three laptops - they do laptop things. Hyprland, LXQt, TDE, Plasma, Gnome, Xfce.

HP Omen - an old gaming PC that is now acting as my home theater PC. Plasma6 xlibre.

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I’m running Cooker TDE on my main laptop that follows me around the house when I’m home. It’s a great experience. The distro is wonderful and TDE makes computing great again. THANK YOU to all who make it possible!

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Daily driver. I don’t really mess with multiple flavors. Once I pick one, I stick with it until I get tired of it or it starts to go in a direction that I don’t care for.

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