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.
I absolutely agree. In the unsupported section of the COOKER repo they already have runit and I’ve heard that Xlibre is planned to be used in the future. SonicDE in my opinion is the perfect KDE Plasma replacement. Fortunately we still have some time because it appears that COOKER is two point release or so behind the latest upstream and the ROME is behind COOKER until they UM it, and then ROCK is 2 to 3 point releases behind ROME ( sometimes more ).
This makes me think that we have about a year or more before KDE finally phases out Xorg support but by then Xlibre + SonicDE will already be supported and also I think there will be enough people at that point who want to contribute to Xlibre’s development that it will have had many bugfixes and improvements. Things which are unstable or buggy now may likely be fixed by then.
I am all for a systemd-free version of OpenMandriva kind of like Devuan. I know that runit would be excellent in OpenMandriva and the only thing I see missing are scripts for the packages in the repo which deal with applicable services. It would not be too difficult to study another distro’s repos which uses runit and simply port their service scripts to work with OpenMandriva. This would give us the potential to have a systemd-free, Xlibre + SonicDE spin of OpenMandriva which could eventually be a ROCK version once it makes it to ROME and ROME syncs to ROCK. I honestly would say in terms of OpenMandriva’s ethos they are my favorite distro. The only thing missing is the systemd-free + runit + SonicDE traits. If they had these things they would be as close to perfect as I think that they could get for now. There are some other ideas I have such as maybe a git based script which can crawl for depends and do something similar to portage to build rpmbuilds which are made for OpenMandriva. I am doing research on things like this right now as well as researching how to create a fully automated Xanmod patched script which takes the source for the OpenMandriva kernel whether rc or stock and git clones the Xanmod patches and then builds a Xanmod patched version with better timers, with AVX / AVX2 utilization, and with v2, v3, and v4 already enabled. These improvements in my opinion are another thing which is missing.
The entire distro is built with CLANG / LLVM which I think is awesome and I love it. Even the kernel is built this way and Xanmod is also built with CLANG / LLVM and uses the ThinLTO and so I think they would be compatible but the Xanmod patches would improve the timers being used, would get rid of bottlenecks in memory usage by the kernel making it much more efficient and alot snappier, and also would enable the native CPU flags by default to optimize performance while being potentially even more stable because it uses 250hz ticks instead of 1000hz ticks with proprietary timers instead of the stock rt timers for preemption. It would ping the kernel every 4ms instead of every 1ms which allows things to catch up thus eliminating bottlenecks.
I used it in Devuan and loved it. It was by far better than Liquorix in my opinion. These are some ideas that I have and would love to see utilized in an OpenMandriva spin and I do agree that XFCE and other non-systemd capable DE’s would be nice to include in such a spin in the OM Welcome.
Imagine having a build system to use useflags as well as an option to ask if the user wants to enable cpu flags for compiler and rpmbuild configs when installing the distro. OpenMandriva seems to have alot of nice optimizations and so these are some other optimizations which people may enjoy.
It would seem to me (as just a user) that SonicDE would be the way for OpenMandriva to go just based off of Mandrake’s history with KDE. I have always been loyal to KDE. I have never liked GNOME or its forks. I switch regular Windows users over to GNU/Linux using KDE, and they are very comfortable. With the upcoming Windows 12 looking like it is going to require all user accounts to be Microsoft online accounts, there may be more and more Windows users coming to distros like OpenMandriva. I support OpenMandriva as it works great, the community is very helpful, and it is un-woke/apolitical.
IF OpenMandriva went to SonicDE and became non-systemd, would things like the application list and GPU activity in its “System Monitor” work? I know those are issues having tried Devuan with KDE in the past.
I am tempted to switch from KDE Plasma to SonicDE now if there are directions on how to safely do so. (EDIT: Just found out SonicDE is not quite complete as of yet.)
Vendefoul Wolf is using it as a main DE with Xlibre already and so it is definitely possible. From my own research ROME is maybe 2 releases behind and COOKER is one behind upstream latest bleeding edge. ROCK appears to be a point release that only updates when ROME is perfectly synced with COOKER and is stable ( It is getting close to another ROCK update ). This means that the potential to use SonicDE is not farfetched at all and neither is the Xlibe idea. I have read some other threads about people wanting to do this in OpenMandriva. I am all for it. By the time KDE Plasma 6.8 drops X11 support and comes to OpenMandriva I am thinking that SonicDE will have had plenty of time to mature further and it is quite possible it could become something that is mainstream by then as well as Xlibre having many bugs worked out of them by then. I do know that I tried Xlibre in Devuan and it worked flawlessly on my machine that had Devuan Stable before. The versioning isn’t that far off, so it is possible and plausible.