How has OM been treating you?

Coffee break
1

I am curious how people that have started using Open Mandriva in the past few months are getting along. How does it compare to the distribution that you are coming from?

For my self, I installed OM ROME on my daily driver, a 4 year old System76 Lemur Pro laptop on a spare SSD, taking the place of Pop!_OS (at least temporarily). The two biggest changes for me were going from a Gnome based desktop to KDE. While I do use KDE on other computers, it means programs like Evolution don’t look their best on OM. And it also meant leaving the Apt package management that I like and returning to RPM based packages which I learned to dislike many years ago (we called it “RPM hell” back then).

Getting used to KDE isn’t too big of a deal, I finally figured out how to make it stop beeping and booping every time e-mail arrived or I hit Esc in vim. If I want my e-mail program to integrate better I’ll switch to kmail. RPMs and my understanding of package dependencies have come a long way so moving from apt to dnf isn’t a huge deal except with OM ROME you have to check this message board before updating to make sure you aren’t in the middle of a repo server update. As I write this on 3/27 we are still waiting for the update which started on 3/25. I dislike the idea that I can bork my OS because I forgot to check the tail end of a lengthy post to see if a repo update is in progress. Maybe I’m misunderstanding and overstating this issue, but there must be a better way.

The install went seamlessly as did installing all of the extra software, though I am more of a command line installer than a GUI “software store” installer so I’ve no idea if that bit works well. The only issue was that my ~15 year old Brother laser printer was not supported out of the box and I had to manually install the driver for it. In the past 15 years I’ve never had to install a driver for it when using Debian or Pop!_OS. Ah well, can’t have and don’t want every device driver under the sun to be installed be default.

These are things that I can adjust to and get used to, no big deal. Overall everything else has been going well. Sleep works well, screen and keyboard brightness works well, bluetooth works well, and Super+Ctrl+left/right switches desktops in a way that is similar to Cosmic (the Gnome based one) which is nice.

There is one area in which OM is lacking that has been a bit of an issue for me and I don’t know if I want to just switch back to Pop!_OS or dig in and help out on OM. That issue being a lack of packages as compared to Debian and distros based on it. Closely related to that is when building software from source you need to install its dependencies first and nobody lists the packages needed for building on OM. If they list the packages needed for Fedora then they might match the packages on OM or be close enough to help in locating their OM equivalents. This first reared its ugly head when trying to build the Ladybird browser, I gave up. Then I wanted to install Bible software and BibleTime is the one and only option and it crashes whenever I try to open a text. My Bible software of choice on Pop is Xiphos, but it isn’t available on OM. I used to spec file from Fedora to help me locate the needed dependency packages, but eventually I was unable to find biblesync-devel on OM which put an end to that. I once tried to install a Fedora RPM on OM, but that just crashed out on me. In the past I have built a .deb on Debian testing and installed it on Pop and have it work just fine, until Pop fell behind and dpkg stops the install due to incompatible versions of dependencies. Of course I realize that OM is not derived from Fedora as Pop is derived from Debian and wasn’t expecting to to work, I just had to try.

Thus I find myself at a crossroad. Jump in and start packaging software that I use and any of its needed dependencies, or go back to the comfort of Pop!_OS. For now it is easier to keep using OM than to swap out the SSD which requires removing 11 screws.

How are all you other new users of OM fairing?

3 Likes
2

I’m fitting very well here, the system works for my needs(finally a distro i like), the people are cool, had some issues here and there but I’ve solved all already and now my system is working flawless, the support from OM is incredible as well, and I’m really new, 2 weeks here. My second rolling release distro after my disastrous experience with another one. I’m probably staying here for the next years.

3 Likes
3

Xiphos is GTK and Bibletime is QT. Both run on the same libraries. Bibletime works fine for me, but may not for you.

The Gnome ISO should work fine if you want to go with that. We have users running it right now.

Now, you are correct. We don’t have as many packages as Debian. We have a small team, but they do take package requests. GitHub · Where software is built They work on them first come, first served, for the most part.

I came here from Lunduke.com and I am happy here. Everyone seems to get along really well, except for a couple of people who didn’t seem to fit in and they left. It’s a great community.

6 Likes
4

I’m not a new user, so I won’t answer your original question – but I can answer some of the other questions you’ve brought up.

There’s no need to check the forum or matrix channels when updating ROME. It is advisable to do that when running Cooker, but for ROME it’s just an extra precaution while a sync is happening.
But in reality, given the metadata is refreshed last, if you update ROME at a bad time, the update will simply fail (without breaking your system) and you can try again later.
We do publish the warning because something could theoretically go wrong, so if you want to be paranoid, look for it – but in practice, if you just run an update it’ll work (or fail without breaking anything, if a sync is running).

The .deb vs .rpm thing comes up quite a bit, and some people coming from the .deb world are wondering why we’ve gone the other way. The answer may surprise people who have been in “rpm hell”: rpm is better. For a typical end user, it doesn’t matter which one is used, both work, and both dnf and apt do an equally good job at resolving dependencies. But if you look at packaging, it’s where rpm really shines (or rather, where dpkg really stinks, because other packaging systems like pacman are much closer to rpm). You don’t need to know how to write Makefiles or things like that, since an rpm spec file is essentially just a shell script with a header and a few macros, if you know how to build something from source, you can figure out how to build an rpm in an hour or so. And with the declarative build system in rpm 4.19+, it’s even easier, often you need just the headers, since it knows how to build stuff using cmake, meson or autotools by itself.
The “problem” that you can easily install a .deb file on any distro that uses .debs, but you can’t always install a .rpm file from another distro on an rpm, exists - but this is neither rpm’s fault nor a sign that dpkg does something better. On the contrary: While this is hard to grasp before knowing the true reason, it’s because rpm is better. Why? Every single distribution that uses .debs is more or less closely based on Debian. Not a single independently developed distribution decided to pick up dpkg because it is inferior to the other options. They all either picked rpm or wrote their own packaging system.
If someone chose to build an independent distribution with dpkg, or e.g. OpenMandriva switched to dpkg without also switching to a Debian base, we’d have the exact same “deb hell”, because the while the packages would use the same package manager, they wouldn’t be built on the same base, the core packages wouldn’t have the same names, etc. - installing a .deb from one distro on the other would likely not work.
So when a dpkg advocate says “.deb is much better than .rpm because you can install a .deb on any dpkg based distro”, he is really saying “dpkg is such a piece of crap that nobody else uses it, therefore .deb files you find anywhere are quite homogenous. It is great that dpkg sucks!”.

We have 14848 packages - I wouldn’t call that a small number, despite the fact that we’re smaller, it’s more than Arch (11576) or Void (8823) or OpenSUSE Leap (14461). But of course it’s not everything that’s out there. We do take package requests.
One of those 14848 packages is ladybird by the way – you don’t even have to build it yourself.

I could reproduce your BibleTime problem, and it took less than 5 minutes to fix (the fixed package is in Cooker – and just in time to make it into 6.0) – but a problem we don’t know about is not a problem we can work on fixing. If something doesn’t work, we need to know. You can’t assume that there’s a billion other users and someone must have reported it before. There’s neither a billion users, nor does everyone report something.

I hope this clarifies a few things.

13 Likes
5

Bug reports and package requests. Both are good. If you don’t know how to file them, just post about it and tell me. I will do it for you.

2 Likes
6

I switched to OM around mid-to-late January, and I’ve been loving it! Granted, my experience with Linux as a whole is somewhat limited, as I switched over to using it full time close to 3 years ago. I started with Ubuntu, so I was very familiar with Gnome and the whole “Debian-based” environment.

When I started with OM, I went with the Gnome spin knowing that it wasn’t as fully maintained/supported as KDE. I had a couple of very minor glitches with Gnome, plus I heard that they would eventually be implementing AI, so I decided that it would be a great time to learn KDE. I’m glad that I did. I did a fresh install of OMLx Rome using the KDE slim iso, and everything has been great! I now understand where all of the Gnome hate comes from. I had no idea how bad I had it until I switched to KDE.

Sure, I’ve come across some apps that weren’t in the OM repos that I really wanted, and if that app didn’t have a flatpak, I’ve gone to their Github page and followed the instructions to compile the app from source. So far, that process has worked great! It also helps that, whenever attempting to build something from source, I’ve used the AI features in Warp’s terminal to help me find missing dependencies that had different names in the OM repos (I’ve since become much better at using “dnf search” to find things…so I’m gradually moving away from relying on Warp to help me out).

Overall, the OM community is amazing, the support is awesome, and I love the distro! It’s significantly better than Ubuntu (which might not actually be that great of a compliment since Ubuntu is…well…Ubuntu), and I feel like I’ve actually learned more about Linux as a whole after switching over.

5 Likes
7

Xiphos is available as a flatpak through the Discover program, have you tried that? I know some people dont like to install through discover but I have had great luck installing from there. Everything I’ve tried from there just worked.

How has OM been treating me?

I was a complete Linux newbie when I tried out OpenMandriva, so I had no preconceived notions of what Linux “should be” so I think that give me an edge in how I perceive it. I just took what they gave me and ran with it. So far it has been great. . I’ve found that getting old games to work is quite a bit easier on Linux than on Windows. New games not so much, but not hard as long as it works on Linux in the first place. DayZ is much more stable on Linux than it ever was on Windows.

I too ran into the Brother driver issue. Mine is about 12 years old but I figured out that the generic driver provided by OM works better than it did on windows. It is wired to my router but thats because I couldn’t get the thing to run off wifi in windows.

Almost the prepackaged apps have worked just fine for me except for Ktorrent. It just doesnt seem to want to pick up DHT or trackerless torrents. I got Qbittorrent from discover and it works fine. This was the only time that I replaced a prepackaged app so how could I complain?

Ill probably use OM as long as it is around, It has given me no reason to distro hop.

2 Likes
8

I switched to OM is January from Arch on my gaming PC and laptop, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my home media server. I use KDE most of the time so there really wasn’t anything new there except for some minor differences in the settings app that I think are implemented by OM. There are a few programs that are unavailable, but I just use the flatpak or install from a tarball on github until the package requests are done. I have had a little trouble that I attribute to me just being used to Arch. Overall, it works just how I would expect it to work.

2 Likes
9

I’m happy to hear that others are finding OMLx to work well for them. I didn’t consider that some of the new converts might by trying Linux for the first time (or close to it). Welcome to Linux!

@bero Fantastic post, I hardly know where to begin. I got your BibleTime fix, thanks. I didn’t report it because I’m still in the “kicking the OMLx tires” phase and am more interested in seeing what works than in trying to report all of the issues that I run into.

I believe what you said about apt/deb versus dnf/RPM, a few weeks ago I did a search on distrowatch for independent distros that use apt and got zero results. At the time I thought that a bit odd, now I know why. Also, I have been working to package ladybird for Debian and what you have done to accomplish the same for OMLx is far less than what I have to jump through to get a working and policy compliant deb. Debian doesn’t have skia so I would need to package it as well. The amount of effort to get skia packaged only to face many months of delay to find a sponsor and waiting for it to get added to the repo is very unmotivating.

I found and installed ladybird, I just assumed no one had packaged it yet. Debian won’t allow packages for pre-alpha software. The only problem I ran into was

$ ladybird
ladybird: command not found

I know how to find which files a deb package installs, but not dnf so I consulted the internet and found that I should run

$ dnf repoquery -l ladybird

Of course this didn’t work so I kept digging and spent some time in the dnf4 man page before I found that the repoquery command should have worked. As it turns out, the repos were in the middle of being updated which broke this functionality for a while today. This wasn’t till after I found your spec file for ladybird and found that the binary is named Ladybird. Clearly I’m not very bright given the amount of time it took me to figure this all out.

Ladybird is going to eventually need a Swift compiler. That is something that I could help with, I just need to decide if I am going to give OMLx a permanent home on a computer first.

3 Likes
10

I came here from Lunduke’s video, and my experience has been somewhat good (and some bad to be honest). I can’t get Plasma to run correctly (due to SDDM issues) on my dual graphics laptop for the life of me. I can run Plasma on other distros fine, but we can’t seem to find the issue (after doing quite a bit of troubleshooting with the OM team). No biggie, I’ve just switched to Gnome for now (uses GDM3), and it works flawlessly.

As far as package availability, most I’ve found in the repos, but not by usual naming conventions. Most have x86_64 prior to the main package name, which is just something I had to get used to; used to it now, so no biggie.

The biggest thing for me that kept me here initially was the community. I’m free to talk about things I like to talk about without harsh repercussions from my community peers. I can say “Later y’all I’m headed to church” without receiving ridicule. Likewise, on the other side of the aisle, people can state their beliefs without being banished immediately.

Does OM need to grow and mature more? Sure. Are they doing the absolute best they can with the smaller team they have? 100%. The level of support I’ve gotten from the OM team is fantastic. They immediately (when available; can’t expect people to be online 100% of the time) jump in and try to help me figure out the problem, and fix it, often making the relevant fix in the repos immediately.

After I begin my new job next month and get settled, I’ve already decided I’ll be staying with OM (admittedly I do have Hyprland Arch on another laptop, only because the setup I’m using there requires Arch packages) and jumping in with packaging, and eventually maintaining a spin. Because these are the kind of people I want to struggle through the tough times of growing a distro with. It isn’t painful to come to the forum, or Matrix and I don’t feel like I have to silently lurk because I don’t feel welcome. On the contrary.

So in conclusion… Does the distro need work? Yep. Am I going to stay and help rather than return solely to Garuda? Absolutely (though no judgement to those that decide others are better for them).

8 Likes
11

I have only used ROME for a month or two now and still have installs of Debian and Arch on separate machines. All of my problems so far are “ME” problems, lack of familiarity with rpm package management. This is ironic because when I first tried Linux, it was Fedora. So my switch to Linux followed an unusual route. I only used Fedora for about 6 months and this was coming from Windows so I literally did not know anything about Linux or Unix like systems. However, I plan on staying. The community support is outstanding in terms of technical instruction and human morale.

I look forward to the time that I can offer constructive criticism to help improve the distro.

4 Likes
12

I’ve been using OM since January and can’t see going back. I’ve even been helping with packaging as time permits.

2 Likes
13

I came here Jan 6th and this has become my home. I have watched the tiny team of developers grow. Several new members have joined and now it is just a small team, but a lot of bugs have been fixed and a lot of packages have been added.

I love this place.

4 Likes
14

I’ve been using OM for several months now, and like many others discovered it via Lunduke’s video when I was looking for a new gaming-compatible distro. Generally, the OM experience has been pretty good. I did make the new-to-OM mistake of using Discover to update packages and wound up just reinstalling instead of unwinding the mess.

The one annoyance is the cut & paste inconsistency issue. But it’s not isolated to OM, because one of my friends experiences it on Fedora with KDE & Wayland.

This morning I ran into a broken package, hfsutils, a niche tool I imagine few, if any are using. As the kernel drivers are installed ootb, though, I will file an issue.

For folks missing packages and do not want to build from scratch or do not want to bother the OM team with very niche use cases, an alternative is installing distrobox with either docker or podman (my choice). For example, I use distrobox to set up (& maintain) a Debian 12 podman container with Signal’s native repo.

I’m not a developer, but have packaged software for use on company servers prior to the existence of repos, including OSS packages for SunOS and Solaris. I understand the struggles of devs and maintainers and appreciate all the hard work you put into the OM project.

My OM move was prompted after the rpm-ostree big gaming distro’s mods would not explain why I was muted for nothing more than posting a link to the well-known Rog Ally SD card issue. My other posts were assisting other users with solutions or chiming in with my own experience on issues and/or my troubleshooting. If you have a technical problem I don’t care what your politics are, I’ll try help you solve it. Apparently not all people have embraced the original OSS ethos.

I still haven’t rebuilt my Rog Ally to move off that gaming distro, have too many projects in flight. Right now I’m working on a new mini HTPC and contemplating switching from Kodi to Jellyfin.

2 Likes
15

Welcome! We are happy to see you here.

“The one annoyance is the cut & paste inconsistency issue. But it’s not isolated to OM, because one of my friends experiences it on Fedora with KDE & Wayland.”

The folks at KDE are working on that. I think we have it solved here.

2 Likes
16

I’m pretty sure it was recommended back in February’s update to kernel 6.13 to remove hfsutils prior to that upgrade. That could explain why it wouldn’t be working too well for you :+1:

1 Like
17

Thanks! I’ll try removing it all and re-installing. It’s complaining about missing libtcl8.6 dependency that isn’t available. I was suprised to see the kernel modules were already installed when I was trouble-shooting.

18

ROME major upgrade expected - #48 by rugyada

1 Like
19

I haven’t searched for a solution in the past few weeks. I disabled clipboard history (though I can’t recall how at the moment :person_facepalming:) hoping that would help, but it did not.

20

Right-Click the arrow down by the clock.
Click Configure System Tray
Click Entries
Scroll down to Clipboard and set it to whatever you choose.
:grinning:

1 Like