I poked around sourceforge last week and tried the ISO’s at OpenMandriva Lx - Browse /release/6.0 at SourceForge.net
Both the xfce & lxqt ISO booted and installed ok albeit with the Rock 6.0 bugs of om-welcome and other apps crashing with nouveau driver - OK after nvidia driver from the repo installed.
Will have a look at the ROME builds you have pointed me to Ben and report back.
As far as I am concerned the present ROME 26.02 Plasma builds are quite good now.
Our friends in FreeBSD are not being left out.
It now seems that KDE dropping X11 support will happen much soon than we thought according to this new report: https://youtu.be/E9Y-t6AwAtI?si=zy_1Rhd2e6xuPqcu
Is there any thought to how OM might address this if things are changing a lot faster than previously thought? Also, if anyone has experience with using Xfce with OM, I’d love to hear suggestions about how I might make the switch.
I did a test install of the latest Rome XFCE build two weeks ago:
The giant US defence contractor known as IBM/Redhat has sucessfully rammed through system breaking non backwards compatible changes starting with systemd, gnome + hard dependency on systemd, wayland.
Now the news kde is rushing to embrace hard dependency on systemd and dropping x11 just like the other girls over in Gnome 3/4 is really bad news for the many like me who cannot throw away perfectly good hardware just to keep up with the whims of fashion.
Many of the big name distro’s are also rushing to drop ‘legacy’ nvidia drivers further exacerbating the problem - Yes I know nvidia is the cause but removing kernel/driver combinations early is bastardry in my humble opion.
This weekend my RTX 3050 GPU suddenly died. I simply cant afford to run out and buy another right now but i did have a perfectly useable nvidia GT1030 4gb vram card spare, but guess what? OM like many distro’s does not ‘support’ the drivers.
My best choice was install Linux Mint which does have all the legacy drivers. A sad day. I chose their Mate ISO because it is fully featured thanks to its Gnome 2 heritage and is highly unlikely to recieve massive, unwelcome and unneeded changes.
As for OpenMandriva, avoiding the fashion victims Gnome and KDE Plasma with their Wayland obsession - Mate/X11, Xfce/X11 and LxQT/X11 all are installable from recent Rome ISO’s and are useable - as long as you have a ‘supported’ GPU.
By the time Mint and others have been assimilated by IBM/Redhat I will be happily on GhostBSD or something for desktop.
Cheers and sorry to not be more upbeat!
which is in itself interesting, since kde is ‘german’ software and germany right now is going: we want to own our stack, yet…
Remarkably short sighted.
Gnome is also completely embedded with SystemD.
Suckless distros like Artix are dropping Gnome support because of this, the distro is so embedded with SystemD that it won’t function with another init system. This is all backward from a truly POSIX compatible system. Gnome shouldn’t care if it’s on Wayland or X, and it shouldn’t care if you use OpenRC or SystemD.
Clearly it wasn’t a technical decision but a strategic decision. With hindsight, the inexorable assimilation of the Linux userland has steadily disempowered users.
Poeterring’s cancerous systemd has jumped at the chance to begin implementing the infrastructure to support these surveillance laws. Note that Poettering has blocked reverts and hiding behind the corporate fig leaf of ‘still deciding’ thereby retaining the hated changes.
(Check out the systemd github)
Canonical has had a shower of changes to the same end. Note that they are hiding behind the corporate fig leaf of ‘still deciding’ while the changes proceed apace.
Arch has rushed to include it in its installer.
Fortunately as with the attempt to subvert X11, forks are happening.
That’s the beauty of open source - when some bad actor does something a fork can happen. With SystemD and Wayland, IBM and Microsoft forced the competing standard to be extinguished. Thank God for the Xlibre efforts, and the alternative init systems.
I’ve been testing Artix for a few days now, and I’m really impressed. They already have a plan to deal with KDE’s abandonment of X as well.
I agree!
I have done quite a bit of testing in recent weeks. My two top recommendations are Artix and Void.
I will be switching all my OpenMandriva Cooker releases that utilize xLibre from Plasma to SonicDE soon.
Ideally would be a tremendous breakthrough if we collectively, in 2027, would have Cooker download page offer to opt-out of legacy xOrg, of systemd and of KDE in favour of SonicDE officially, so I can just get .iso
If I manage to stick around for long enough to contribute, and if I tamper with these somewhat successfully, maybe I will be the one to lead these breakthroughs. This is personally very important for me that it happens.
While we don’t have systemd-free OpenMandrive, I hope the fixes and forks for the age stuff will be pulled into our distros as well. Albeit have to note that r4shsec might have a “tantrum fork” unless at least like 3-12 people commit to it on a regular basis.