My review while testing OpenMandriva for few days

Coffee break
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Hi, everyone

I moved to Linux as daily driver 2 months ago with Fedora KDE. I was able to run everything I needed so even though I still have a running Windows drive i don’t switch to it anymore. Since the hd where Fedora was installed starting having issues, I switched it with a new one and decided to test a non main-stream distro like Openmandriva 6 Rock. As a daily driver most of the things work as expected however compared to Fedora I encountered these issues:

  1. Unable to install some packages like: nordvpn, portmaster
    I even by looking at the posts on OM forum I still wasn’t able to make nordvpn install correctly. Had problems installing VeraCrypt too, but they have an .appimage version so was able to run that

  2. The Autostart GUI does not work. Its impossible to add apps on autostart, the change is undo when you change menu. There is a manual way to do it, but whats the point of making life harder.

  3. Issue with Nextcloud account integration. Dolphin does not connect with it.

  4. Unable to show the “Calendar Events” option in Digital Clock, because of errors installing kdepim-runtime kdepim-addons

  5. The Wallet password kept being asked after reboot, also the admin pswd seems to get asked many more times compared to Fedora, even though I added myself on wheel and change the config to nopasswd line in sudoers, and remove the timeout for requesting it.

Anyway I still believe its a nice linux distro to use as daily driver. The Multimedia/Codecs stuff was easier then Fedora

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Welcome.

We package flatpak to fulfill requirements like this. There are a lot of package requests, but no one wants to package what they request. We hope new people will want to get involved, but we can’t compel them to do that.

You will need to put in a topic on Support with the required information. There is not enough information to assist with this and this isn’t the right topic.

These could be bugs. Make a new topic in Support for each.

This is probably a known annoyance with newer versions of Plasma. Fedora is not a KDE based distro. Plasma is a spin for them. Their primary goal is GNOME. If you don’t want to be prompted for the password there are ways to turn that off. We have that in the forum as well. You can use the Search function to find it.

3 Likes
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Hi @JonnyJewel :waving_hand:

While we appreciate the review, your “review” lists a number of issues you’ve run into (fair enough).

But you never asked for support.

As @zeroability stated above, each of those issues should have been filed in the support category as a separate issue (along with the required heading). Couple examples:

A quick read of the wiki will lead to this page:

which gives you the search command. Then a quick search shows neither nordvpn nor portmaster are in the repo. And a quick glance at pkgs.org confirms this (just in case… I’ve been known to have typos in my search and this usually catches them)

So that means flatpak/appimage or roll your own.

As for the calendar in OMLx it isn’t preconfigured. KDE makes it a royal pain in the ass to get their Kontact suite configured. None of those programs talk to the “SystemSettings → Online Accounts”. You have to set up each program separately. They use a separate backend (akonadi) :roll_eyes:

Once that is set up then you can start on the clock/calendar in the panel.

On my Rock install the following “pim” libraries are installed

dnf list installed | grep pim

kpimtextedit
lib64KPim6Libkdepim
lib64appimage1
plasma6-kdepim-addons
plasma6-kdepim-runtime
plasma6-kpimtextedit
plasma6-libkdepim
plasma6-pim-data-exporter
plasma6-pimcommon

Obviously not all apply. The most important ones for this case are:

lib64KPim6Libkdepim
plasma6-kdepim-addons
plasma6-kdepim-runtime
plasma6-libkdepim

Assuming they are there, now you can configure the calendar. When you do make sure there is a “calendar events” plugin and it is active. That should be all you need to do.

Dolphin is the same way…you have to add the drives manually (or in your fstab) and then you can “add to places”

Hope this helps

Edit:

PS: None of this is actually an OMLx issue. These problems are talked about on the KDE forums going back 10 years.

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I’m starting to wonder what the point is of testing and only providing a review in a venue and topic that would not be frequented by people heavily involved with the work to create the product being reviewed/critiqued. It doesn’t seem to be very productive.

I have also stated in many other posts on the forum that the versions of software we use will be newer, and that other distros use older software because they need to be viable to continue receiving funding. We are not under any such constraints.

Could OMLx be strictly a consumed distro like every other mainstream distro? Probably, but it would take away the uniqueness and independence for little to no value in return. But, that is the difference in expectations between those that want to become invested in making things better, and those that just want to consume the work of others.

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Noticed another one lately. Its the same as in this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/n97l5p/toggling_the_status_doesnt_turn_on_the_bluetooth/

It happens after I put the PC to sleep and start it back. Need to reboot to get the Bluetooth adapter and the devices attached back.

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I think this was a positive review, wasn’t it?

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Then you need to open a topic in Support and provide the info we ask for both in the template and the pinned topic about how to get better help.