Many questions, several bugs and a little feedback

Coffee break
1

Hello,

Requirements:

I have Searched the forum for my issue and found nothing related or helpful
I have checked the Resources category (Resources Index)
I have reviewed the Wiki for relevant information
I have read the the Release Notes and Errata

OpenMandriva Lx version:

OMLx 6.0 Plasma slim x86_64

Desktop environment (KDE, LXQT…):

KDE Plasma 6

Description of the issue (screenshots if relevant):

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve spent days and days trying to figure this stuff out myself over the course of more than two months before daring to post, because of the stern warnings to RTFM prior to asking for help. So if I missed anything that could have answered any of my questions, I’m really sorry but I’ve waded through quite literally several hundred forum threads (including the resources) as well as repeatedly scouring the wiki (including release notes and errata), without finding answers with which I’ve managed to get much further. (I did however find that the wiki appears to be a little outdated here and there - e.g. Desktop Presets. Either that, or it is inapplicable to the Plasma Slim version - e.g. Flatpak.).

Windows 10 regular updates came to an end October 14th 2025, and extended security updates will end on October 13th 2026. For this reason, I’m trying to set my elderly and tech-illiterate parents up with Linux.
I myself have been using various Linux distributions alongside Windows since mainstream support ended for Windows XP, and exclusively since extended support ended for Windows 7. But I wouldn’t claim to be an advanced user by any stretch of the imagination, which is unfortunate given that my parents rely heavily on me when it comes to using the computer.
I’ve settled on OpenMandriva for them, because that is what I intend to switch to myself after support ends for Pop_OS! 22.04 LTS, which is what I’m currently using. (I’m not a fan of Wayland nor of Rust, so I’m not very happy about the direction Pop_OS! has chosen for future releases; and OpenMandriva came highly recommended to me by others who feel the same way.)
That brings me to my first question: Is OpenMandriva going to be poor choice for people like my parents, given that they are the type who have trouble with such basics as printing documents, adding attachments to E-mails, creating folders or resizing windows?

Secondly, I loathe KDE Plasma more than any other Desktop Environment (except perhaps COSMIC), so my first inclination was to install one of the Spins (particularly GNOME, alternatively Cinnamon). However, those come with the caveats ‘Do not expect everything to work “out of the box”’ and ‘Bug fixing is not high priority’, which leads me to believe that they at least aren’t suitable for my parents.
Is it still the case that none of the spins has feature parity with the flagship editions, and they are not on par in terms of stability?
Is it still the case that there are no dedicated maintainers for any of the spins, and bug fixes are consequently slow?

So instead, I downloaded the Plasma Slim version for Intel CPU. While I don’t want to say that was in any real sense difficult, it also wasn’t as simple and straightforward a process as for many other distributions I’ve previously installed.
For example, just to get to the download took quite a few clicks from the homepage: Download > Rock > OMLx 6.0 Plasma Slim > OMLx 6.0 Plasma slim x86_64 > And then you counter-intuitively have to click on the ID number (3910) instead of on the product name (6.0 plasma6.x11 slim x86_64)… Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining or saying that you need to change anything about the way it is currently (I found my way well enough, after all). I’m just trying to provide a little UX feedback, in case it is something you want to know about. So please feel free to completely ignore this paragraph up to this point, if you prefer.
Something I personally do believe really does need changing, however, is the disk images being unsigned: there are file hashes to check that the download wasn’t corrupted, but I can’t find any signatures to check that the disk image (and it’s hash) wasn’t tampered with, nor even any OpenMandriva signing key.

After I finished installing OpenMandriva, I rebooted, removed the thumb drive from which I’d installed, and signed in. The login screen appeared for a split second before everything was replaced by an empty black screen with a pulsing underscore symbol in the top left. Unfortunately, it was not a usable TTY like the ones mentioned in some other threads about encountering black screens: so I couldn’t enter any commands like “startx”, “sudo systemctl disable sddm.service” or “sudo systemctl enable lightdm.service”, nor even “reboot”, “shutdown” or “poweroff”. Even worse, the magic SysReq sequences REISUB and REISUO didn’t work, with every magic command except S returning a message saying that magic SysReq was not enabled. I was therefore forced to hold down the power button until the computer forced a shutdown on the hardware level.
Upon rebooting, the login screen stayed up and I signed in. This automatically launched the OM Welcome app. I played around in that for a while (installing Nvidia drivers, Firefox, etc.), before the same thing happened again: empty black screen with pulsing underscore.
Turns out that this is a recurring problem: frequently after booting up, clicking something in the OM Welcome app will cause the system to get stuck in this state. It also happens randomly while using programs like Konsole, Dolphin, DnfDrake, Kate and Firefox, etc. And almost as frequently, just sitting idly on the login screen or the desktop will trigger it without any interaction.
Searching the forums, I find people with similar black screen issues, though none of them appear to be quite as bad as mine (e.g. TTY doesn’t allow input, magic SysReq doesn’t work, etc.); and most of them are older at this point and thus refer to old builds of different versions, making me question some of their applicability.
Reinstalling with several different initial set-ups (e.g. encrypted and unencrypted partitions, swap and no swap, big swap and little swap, separate root and home partitions or a single shared one, etc.) does not make the issue go away.
I wanted to try changing display managers, as for some people (especially those with Nvidia GPUs) SDDM was the problem. However, I am unable to get LightDM working (“Failed to enable unit: Unit lightdm.service does not exist”). StackExchange and StackOverflow tell me that “sudo systemctl enable” shouldn’t be used for display managers, and that I should instead edit “/etc/X11/default-display-manager”. But that file doesn’t even exist (nor under any subdirectories of “/etc/X11”). So how do I get LightDM enabled? I guess I could also attempt installing GDM (or some other display manager like Ly), but after the issues I got from trying to install GNOME Desktop Environment (more on that below), I’m scared to try.

Wifi will sometimes suddenly disconnect and not be able to reconnect without rebooting. Furthermore, it’s pretty much a coin toss on whether wifi will connect upon startup or not. Meanwhile, other devices in exactly the same physical location have no problems connecting to wifi and remaining connected to it.

Another, less pressing, issue I’ve not managed to resolve yet, is that I don’t have any sound, regardless of which Profiles I select for Playback Devices and Inactive Cards. I would assume this is a common problem, yet I haven’t found any solutions for it short of the suggestion to replace Pipewire with Pulse, which seems a bit drastic and unnecessarily risking further complications, as I’m not even sure yet that Pipewire is the problem.

I also noticed that Flatpak does not appear to be installed, unlike what the wiki suggests. I’m assuming that is only true for the Plasma Slim version, but, like the wiki, the flatpak(.)org also seems to assume that every OpenMandriva user already has Flatpak pre-installed. I don’t know if that is something you need to update flatpak(.)org about, or whether that is their own prerogative and responsibility to figure out for themselves. (Fortunately the setup instructions for Mageia are the same.)

Finally, I noticed that in the OM Welcome app there was the option to install other Desktop Environments with a click. Since the spins have those caveats mentioned above (about stuff not working and fixes being slow) but Desktop download options didn’t give any similar type of warning, I’m curious whether alternative Desktop Environments installed through the OM Welcome app after the flagship KDE Plasma version of OpenMandriva is already installed (as opposed to being installed as part of a spin) can be expected to work out of the box without more bugs than KDE Plasma?

I tried installing the GNOME Desktop environment from the OM Welcome app. After that, troubles only increased. For example, after rebooting the OM Welcome app stopped working entirely: it just showed an empty black void inside the borders of the window. Then, several days and many reboots later, I started getting the empty black screen with the pulsing underscore directly upon startup, making it impossible to sign in or do anything anymore.
So I did another clean install. As installing additional Desktop Environments seems to be inviting trouble, I instead tried to change the Desktop Presets to make KDE Plasma appear a little more like Windows 7 or 10. Unfortunately, I can’t find the Desktop Presets described in the wiki at either of the locations outlined (and the resource index labels the corresponding threads as ‘old’). So I’m guessing those have been removed since that was written?
Even more unfortunately, even without installing any other desktop environments, another several days and many reboots later, the OM Welcome app has gone all black again, as above (I guess it wasn’t GNOME’s fault after all), and nothing I’ve tried has managed to restore it for over a month at this point.
And speaking of reboots, the command ‘reboot’ leads to the system getting stuck during shutdown. I can easily avoid this by just using ‘poweroff’ and rebooting manually. But I thought I might as well mention it.

All in all, I’ve been having a pretty rough two plus months with regards to OpenMandriva. And while I’m certainly no Linux expert, if I’m repeatedly getting stuck, I shudder to think about my parents having to figure all this stuff out for themselves.

An attempt at tl;dr was made in boldface.

Thank you in advance. <3

Relevant informations (hardware involved, software version, logs or output…):

$ inxi -Fz
System:
Kernel: 6.14.2-desktop-3omv2590 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.3.4 Distro: OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Vanadium
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: ROG Strix G512LW_G512LW v: 1.0
serial:
Mobo: ASUSTeK model: G512LW v: 1.0 serial:
UEFI: American Megatrends v: G512LW.314 date: 04/27/2021
Battery:
ID-1: BAT0 charge: 48.8 Wh (100.0%) condition: 48.8/66.0 Wh (73.9%)
volts: 15.7 min: 15.7
CPU:
Info: 6-core model: Intel Core i7-10750H bits: 64 type: MT MCP cache:
L2: 1.5 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 3600 min/max: 800/5000 cores: 1: 3600 2: 3600 3: 3600
4: 3600 5: 3600 6: 3600 7: 3600 8: 3600 9: 3600 10: 3600 11: 3600 12: 3600
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel CometLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: NVIDIA TU106M [GeForce RTX 2070 Mobile / Max-Q Refresh]
driver: nvidia v: 575.51.02
Display: x11 server: X(.)org v: 1.21.1.18 driver: X:
loaded: modesetting,nvidia unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915
resolution: 1920x1080~144Hz
API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,kms_swrast,nouveau,nvidia,swrast
platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 575.51.02
renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070/PCIe/SSE2
API: Vulkan v: 1.4.312 drivers: N/A surfaces: xcb,xlib
Info: Tools: api: clinfo, eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo de: kscreen-console
gpu: nvidia-smi x11: xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH cAVS driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: NVIDIA TU106 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
API: ALSA v: k6.14.2-desktop-3omv2590 status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.4 status: active
Network:
Device-1: Intel Comet Lake PCH CNVi WiFi driver: iwlwifi
IF: wlo1 state: down mac:
Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: eno2 state: down mac:
Bluetooth:
Device-1: Intel AX201 Bluetooth driver: btusb type: USB
Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 0 state: down
bt-service: enabled,running rfk-block: hardware: no software: yes
address:
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 9.29 GiB (1.0%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Intel model: SSDPEKNW010T8 size: 953.87 GiB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 124.02 GiB used: 8.43 GiB (6.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
ID-2: /boot/efi size: 299.4 MiB used: 2 MiB (0.7%) fs: vfat
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
ID-3: /home size: 796.26 GiB used: 884.9 MiB (0.1%) fs: ext4
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 7.71 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0
ID-2: swap-2 type: partition size: 16.96 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 38.0 C pch: 32.0 C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (rpm): cpu: 2600
Info:
Memory: total: 16 GiB available: 15.42 GiB used: 1.76 GiB (11.4%)
Processes: 307 Uptime: 1m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.37

2

Welcome.

Slim is meant to be the least bloated of the ISO’s, which means you will need to add things you want later. We tend to not bloat any of the packages as a general principle, and it sometimes breaks things. We tend to move ahead with newer software releases, which tends to break things. Despite all that, we are approachable when it comes to fixing them, where other distros are not.

If all they are doing is browsing the web and creating an occasional document or card, then Rock should meet their needs. It’s the least impacted by updates over a long period of time, so they won’t be annoyed with update prompts. We don’t enable updating by default, but it can be done. Please be sure to note the update command that we use and it should be pinned on the forum or the newcomer chat. It’s the command needed for all releases because of how we release versions of the distro.

The spins will all have the base system underneath. In that, they have feature parity. We make our best effort to have newer versions available so they don’t end up in legacy Hell like other distros would. I’m not going to point any fingers here, but anyone that has used a distro in the past 6 months had distro hopped at least once and knows what I’m talking about.

Spins are community maintained, just like with other distros. We do our best to supplement for the lack of maintainers. One thing people don’t understand about independently managed distros, is we do not get funding from tech oligarchs and govts. As a result, there are maybe one or two people that are working on OMLx full time, but no one is getting paid to do so. The hope is that people will see the value in owning the process and the results of what they are doing with OMLx with their time and their hardware.

We have already been made aware of this. It is on our to-do list.

I’m not sure that is necessary. If you don’t trust the source, why do you trust the key the source provides? We make the ISO’s available directly from our build farm with two forms of checksum. I don’t think adding a signature provides any further digital trust. If our host is compromised, the key could be as well. So, we would just be adding another step and layer of complexity. Something that was already brought up as an annoyance.

I would like to revisit this with you:

You have mentioned nothing about your video card or system specs, at all. You briefly, possibly allude to it here, but we are all volunteers.

You don’t even provide the system specs until after we have read through this entire thing. I get it Pop_OS is Ubuntu based and they just make it so you can consume it, but we really need more than just what looks like a “mildly worded letter,” before we can even begin to help you.

Here’s what I’m going to say about the entirety of this topic for the sake of helping you and others:

  • Put the issues you are having into separate topics in the Support section with the template and pinned topic I linked requirements provided in each. This way, people searching don’t have to wade through this or every possible post you have put on the forum to find an answer.
  • Use Coffee break to ask questions about things not support related, such as new DE’s or alternative DE’s. You can even bring up formal requests in Development > Packages and features requests
  • Don’t blog in Support, and provide cleaner formatting to help readers achieve the goal of helping you better.

We get this a lot where people try to white knuckle their way through using OMLx like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora and ask AI/LLM/Search Engines/etc… instead of us. Then they dump absolutely every problem and disappointment into a single post that reads like trolling. It’s difficult to not think you are just trolling because you don’t really seem that invested in fixing the problems. Maybe that is the fault of indifferent distro projects failing to respond when you needed help, but that isn’t us. If you (and others) just simply do what we ask then the help will come and problems will get solved. We aren’t just sitting in front of our PC’s waiting for someone to give us work, either. Some degree of patience and understanding will be appreciated and reciprocated.

It’s also not a good look to come to a Plasma focused distro, spend 2+ months “fighting with” it without asking anyone for help on the back of a statement like this:

I don’t think your expectations are reasonable in that context.

1 Like
3

This is general information:

For anyone that is not an advanced user and not familiar with OpenMandriva Lx neither the Slim iso nor the desktop spins are the best place to start. It would seem rather more efficient to start with Plasma6 iso and spend time reading documentation and interacting with the community as you learn. Small steps keeping things simple at first. Then as one gets more familiar with the peculiarities of OMLx one might try Slim or a desktop spin.

IMO the Plasma Slim isos AND all the desktop spins are for people that already know what they are doing and are willing to do some problem solving on their own.

If I were setting up a system for any non-technical user like grandpa and grandma I would use Rock Plasma 6 iso. Agreeing with @zeroability on this.

Whatever warnings one sees about reading documentation like “RTFM” should be heeded but if you do not find the answer you are looking for do not be afraid to ask in the Support forum or on OM-Chat.

New folks here need to realize the limitations of what a handful of part-time, unpaid, all volunteer developers and contributors can actually do in the real world.

4 Likes
4

@guest if there are any problems you wish to work on please post your question in the Support forum, please only one problem per forum thread else things get to hard to follow. Use a descriptive title and read and follow this please. You may also consider filing bug reports for serious technical issues or if a problem posted in forum does not get resolved in a a week or so.

5

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. According to the stats on the forum, this user has only been on here 4 days since creating the account in Nov.

6

Because I did all that work while not signed in OF COURSE.

Please stop jumping to the most uncharitable assumptions about “mildly worded letters”, “trolling”, “not invested into fixing problems”, “only been on here 4 days”.

You are being extraordinarily rude and unhelpful after I put so much effort into toning down my support request to be as mild and polite as possible.

7

That seems like it must have been horribly inconvenient for you.

Most people when their system does not boot or reboot do not wait 2 months or more before asking the people that made it how to fix it. If you were that frustrated, why didn’t you ever ask? Because of what reason did that not happen?

You being upset or frustrated is of your own doing. No one here is required to be the recipient of that in whatever form it should take. It’s not part of what we offer to make sure you are not annoyed, upset, or offended. It is/was your parent’s job to teach you how to cope with that.

You can’t expect me (or anyone) to think you are honest when you have not been. You did not spend 2+ months trying to get this to work.

8

I swear to you that I did. Not that you will ever believe me. You prefer to just pull false accusations out of your ass and slander me as a liar. Typical. At least, this make it very clear that you have zero interest in helping people. Clearly you are not going to ever help my parents if they get stuck. Thus OpenMandriva is not the distro for them. Nor for me. Nor for anyone at all. It’s just the same woke garbage as every other Linux these days. Pathetic.

9

Because I was scared that some asshole might accuse me of being lazy and start treating me just the way you are treating me now ANYWAY.

1 Like
10

It was YOUR parents job to teach you some manners. They failed at that. And thus you fail at behaving like a civilized human being. You bring disgrace on yourself, your parents and OpenMandriva. Goodbye commie faggot.

11

Seriously?

Okay, let’s take a breath for a second.

Please refer to a part where I did not help you regardless of the criticism I provided for your format and the length of time you waited and frustrated yourself before stooping to ask the assholes how to fix it?

12

Not adult enough to take criticism. Got it. Yeah, I agree. OMLx is probably not for you and your parents. We can probably just leave it at that.

13

For those that are interested in a possible solution, a simple search from a few years ago may provide some assistance: