Hello all,
I recently viewed The Lunduke Journal’s Youtube video (watch?v=y1AWos_zm6o – I can’t include links in my post) about OpenMandriva. A distribution that does not push some kind ideology unrelated to Linux seems to be rare these days. So I decided to give OM (specifically OpenMandrivaLx.rolling-snapshot.20241225.3522-plasma6x11.x86_64.iso) a look.
(I see the download process is still very confusing. Picking the ROME release, on the ‘release-picking’ page takes me to ABF which provides the above. But the download from Sourceforge provides openmandriva.rome-24.12-plasma6.x11.x86_64.iso. And, clicking “ROME” on the ‘downloads’ page takes me to an even different ABF page.)
I’m still playing around with it in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine, but I initially experience a few issues. The first one is merely more of an annoyance. (There is also one other thing that IMO gives a less-than-stellar impression. But, it is a very minor issue and only my opinion, so I’ll defer that to another time.)
#1 During installation and after selecting my language (the default presented) on the Welcome screen, the next screen (Locale) did not respect my choice nor my location. It forced both my location to Europe/London and forced my preferred language to EN_GB. And, I see why.
In the Calamares ‘locale.conf’ file, the location is configured to force it to Europe/London. Why?
Why not allow Geoip to at least try determining the location instead of explicitly disabling it and forcing the location instead?
After a boot to the Live system, I made modifications to both ‘welcome.conf’ and ‘locale.conf’ before doing the installation, and it worked perfectly - just as expected.
#2 The repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ use newline delimited lists for ‘baseurl’. KDE’s Discover, when using Settings to enable/disable repos, does not understand this and improperly reformats the list using semi-colons. This causes the repos to be ignored due to the invalid configuration.
Apparently, newline delimited lists are not officially supported:
dnf[dot]readthedocs[dot]io/en/stable/conf_ref.html#list-label
#3 And then there’s this:
[user@openmandriva-x8664 ~]$ man dnf
No manual entry for dnf
That, in my view, does not inspire confidence.
I want to like OpenMandriva. Heck, I cut my Linux teeth on Mandrake. And, I don’t know of any other distro that the maintainers of which put forth the effort to remove telemetry from the packages they ship. That is awesome.
BTW, what is ABF? The “About” page at abf[dot]openmandriva[dot]org/ takes me to the OpenMandriva “About” page.