I’m not exactly new here on the forum, but I’ve been flirting at distance with OM for quite some time, let’s say Lunduke video made me take a look at OM.
I’m using Linux Mint at moment, on my desktop and my laptop and I really like Mint for it’s stability and stuff.
So… I’m going to do a little upgrade to my Desktop PC and since I also use it for gaming, I’ve been looking for a Rolling Release distro to get the newer packages and improvements to get more performance and improvements.
So… I’d like to know about the stability of the ROME Rolling Release and, since I use a Ryzen PC, I’d like to know some info about the AMD iso, it’s improvements and everything else.
Let me start off by saying our Stable release (Rock) is by no means as dated as other distros. You might find you can still have those benefits in OM with slightly newer versions of packages.
The znver1 ISO will help you get some gains in performance pertaining to rendering tasks like gaming. Obviously, the bottleneck will be the hardware.
I’m not sure if you have been following along in some of the other topics in the forums such as Support or Development > Development Testing, but we do not have endless supplies of test hardware or people to test. Which means there will be some things that need to be fixed. If that is something you are not opposed to dealing with, then you may enjoy OMLx. We have this forum and our Matrix channels if you wanted to engage with us more to get help.
The goal would be for those that use OM to also contribute in some way to making it work better. It’s actually an upside, because we are not having an indifferent third party tell us what the end product should be. We are doing it for the users.
If you’re upgrading the video card go AMD, but thats not really an OM thing.
Gaming on OpenMandriva is as good or better than any other distro - even the gaming spins. Gamers here that stick to the vanilla experience on generic equipment really dont report many issues.
From my own POV running ROME znver x11 Plasma for the past year+ since moving to OMLx on my daily driver has been awesome.
You ask about stability and I can say from my own experience is that it has been rock solid, I was one of the first few users of OMLx to obtain an AMD 9070XT GPU which forced me to have to use an RC kernel from cooker and some kernel boot params at that time (way back at the start of the year) due to upstream kernel RC patches yet to land downstream (which have since been ironed out),. but after that it has been smooth sailing.
My other bare-metal Zen2 3900X machine has a 6750 XT GPU and booted straight to desktop from the cooker ISO (which at the time last week was near identical to ROME in packages).
Until I upgrade my PC, I’ll create a dual boot on my laptop, yes, isn’t the same hardware as my Desktop, but I’ll do some testing, more in a way to get accostumed to the system. I’ve used Debian-based distros my entire life so, it’ll take some time, but not that much.
Before OM I was looking at Tumbleweed but… Let’s say some things about it got me annoyed and just ignored it since then.
And yes I gave a look at the support and development forums and some little bugs won’t be a problem for me.
I was planning on going to an AM5 platform, but the RAM prices made me change my idea.
I have a R5 5500 with a RX 6600 right now and a good 32GB of RAM.
I’m looking to go to a 5700X or a 5500X3D with a 9060 XT, will cost me 40% of the costs to go to a new platform. So I want an OS that I can get the most out of the hardware I have. And the zen ISO took my attention because of this.
I tested CachyOS on my laptop, my old thinkpad has been my test bed for quite some time now. I like to test using a slower older machine cuz, if that hardware works fast and solid I know I can put the OS on my Desktop machine.
And while CachyOS is freaking fast, ngl, since is arch-based, and updates almost non-stop, at two times I got updates that gave me some headaches, thats the reason I’m looking for a rolling release distro that can also be more stable and don’t make me try taking off my hair.
Former Mint user myself - though technically I still use it for a few things…
The AM4 platform has a major advantage in that it is fully mature and while occasionally AMD surprises us with something new the kernel support is rock solid.
I’ve currently got a 7090XTX on my 5950X and before that I had a 6900XTX. I’ve also got things running just fine on a 6400 (a much maligned card - for no reason I might add..) plugged into a i7-3770.
OM puts the swap partition into ram (using zram). That will speed things up - but only if you actually use a lot of swap.
With 32GB you can probably also put your “/tmp” and “$HOME/.cache” into ram as well (using tmpfs in fstab) And that will speed things up.
And while OM has it’s own “quirks” the bigger pain-in-the-rear for me has been learning KDE.
What you might find useful is to set up a dual boot of OM itself 1 for “work” and the other for “gaming”. One has the full KDE/plasma/everything and the other based on the plasma-slim build (or even LXQT or some such DE). It’s for gaming.
I’m started testing on my laptop, to get accostumed to how it updates and stuff. For now, even tho I don’t like KDE, has been working really well. Just borked some updates on my first install, my mistake, nothing related to the OS. But already fixed it. And well, is quite lightweight, even running KDE.
For some reason I was under the impression you did art. I was super going to ask you about drawing tablets and Linux art making since I am really interested on knowing how well that works.
Either way, welcome to OMV! All my experience with it is that is has been quite stable both in ROCK and ROME versions, with no issues at all. Brave likes crashing everywhere I go, so not an OMV problem. I just cannot type in Japanese, that is all. That aside, everything else is on. I think you’ll have a great time with OpenMandriva.
I do AI art, yes… I know… It’s just that, I don’t have the capacity to do art. But I do write stuff here and there. Isn’t actually something that I can talk about here. But I write stuff.
And well… For my desktop PC i just need, my browser, discord, steam and my PCSX2 emulator. I just need to test the emulator now. And even tho KDE isn’t actually my main liking for DE… It’s been working quite nice and I was happy to see that the Rolling Release uses XLibre for KDE.
Not huge fan of AI, but I do write myself. I wonder what you write about.
I like KDE for its looks, hate the decisions they are making of killing X11 support. Distasteful to say the least. Surprisingly, for me at least, Wayland is fine with it. I use it on Arch, but I would like to stick it to the Wayland shillers with Xlibre if possible.
As for the other activities/programs you mentioned, they should work greatly under OMV. It is amazing how ‘just works’ OMV is.
I write adult stuff in my main language (portuguese). Isn’t something I’m proud of but I consider myself a competent writer for the genre.
I hope in the future XFCE becomes one of the main DE’s too, I like XFCE for being lightweight, nothing against KDE itself, XFCE just has a place in my heart.
And I still need to test so AppImage programs on OM.
Brazilian? If so, same. Save for the genre of writing.
Honestly, in terms of looks, I like Cinnamon if we are going GTK/X11/XLibre. If it is just pure functionality alone, Xfce is guaranteed to be pristine for many years to come. I hope I don’t jinx it by saying that and suddenly the mouse becomes gay or something.
There is an Xfce cooker spin of OMV. I think they need more testing on that front. I might do it later with more time.
I don’t always use appimages, but most of the times I did it worked, but I don’t remember about them under OMV.
Oh yeah, I’m a tipical Brazilian… In some ways. Haha.
I like Cinnamon too, my problem is the lack of SOME customization, I’d love if the guys from Mint add more options to Cinnamon’s Panel, I don’t care about transparency but some more customization options specific to the panel.
I tried some AppImages on OM, worked perfectly. So… Yeah, after my PC upgrade I’ll put Mint back to my Laptop (I like Mint, keeping it on my old laptop for normal mundane stuff sounds okay), and for my main Desktop I’ll put OM, to squeze some extra performance.
It is funny you mention Mint since I am running Mint Cinnamon here, actually. I intend to put it on my main drive, and keep OMV Xfce Cooker on the SSD, and have my old HDD to be the testing ground for anything new or needed.
I could run OMV full time though, to be honest. I doubt I would have Cooker Xfce break on me any time soon. KDE XLibre has, SDDM crashes after a while and I get a black screen. I have yet to report that.
Fórum do OpenMandriva era o ultimo lugar que eu imaginava encontrar um BR. Haha.
You mantioned SDDM crashes. I was tested CachyOS for a month and even on CachyOS SDDM crashed as well and CachyOS uses Wayland as standard. I think this is more of a SDDM stuff than everything else. xD
I’m on same boat. I use Linux Mint on work laptop just to avoid headache with other people on my team, vpn details and etc.
For my personal pc I’m still looking for a distro, to run off politics, data colection and etc. I’m writing from Omarchy but after a month tiling manager is not for me yet.
OpenMandriva Rock is what I’m looking now, I didn’t have time yet to test it on a VM to see if it have all packages I need (Go, Zig, Python e some development tools). And why not, some old RPGs on steam.
I also want to start collaboration with a distro to learn more about linux and this community looks an amazing place to start.
Olha so como o mundo eh pequeno? Welcome to the forums!
Yes, during my time in Cooker and I think ROME too, but I have since changed my system so I cannot speak to that right now. I will probably use Mint instead of Arch on the main m.2, then OMV Cooker Xfce on the SSD, and OMV Plasma XLibre on the test HDD, just to see how it goes.
I also read somewhere KDE is looking to phase out SDDM for their own Display Manager.
There you go, it’s a great distro that just works. However, I do think OMV Rock is at the same level easily, but it is KDE. Improvements can be made for either distros.
I also looked up Omarchy and I hated it. I much prefer base Hyprland with my own Bspwm-like setup (tiled windows or floating, and no dock/bar, just free space).
For any distro, Flatpak is just a gem - and your jam!
