I have been meaning to share my experiences with OMLx for a while now, an interesting flavour distro. Running Rome plasma6. Have some questions too but I’ll put them in another post another day. Loving the friendly community so far, total opposite to the elitism and condescension you’ll find plenty of over on any Linux subreddit…
I came back to Linux having decided to resurrect my old Thinkpad to make use of its amazing keyboard, but found how slow it is on Win11 after many updates and endless background processes slowing it down. That, and the fact Windows is blatantly creeping into spyware territory. Previously I’ve played around with Kali and CentOS in my previous education and then dabbled with Mint many years ago too (I miss the days of PC mags coming with CDs attached with great free software, sigh). How things have changed in the best part of a decade!
I started back with Mint (Xia) XFCE and loved how it made an old laptop feel sharp and responsive again, but it just feels… boring. Started having a look at how to tweak certain things about it on Youtube and came across (you guessed it) Lunduke’s channel and his information on OpenMandriva. I remember Mandrake back in the day, and had completely forgotten about it! It’s nice to see it lives on in a spiritual successor. The real appeal to me at first though is the apolitical stance, focussing on good software. I used to study in IT for years at uni but took a 180 and changed fields due to the people I was surrounded by. IT seems to attract a lot of socially unaware people who insist their Reddit echo chamber opinion is gospel and humanity has been terrible and doing everything absolutely wrong until the modern far-left awakening beginning around 2012 (in the West anyway). It’s a shame that one side of the political isle seems to have a stranglehold on the industry right now, not least due to Silicon Valley. I do believe software should be for all, and not leveraging its collective might to force issues that others don’t agree with them on.
IT used to be very libertarian, once upon a time.
Beyond the politics, OpenMandriva’s been similar OOTB like Mint. I’m using a Thinkpad 11e Yoga gen6 to experiment with it while my main laptop is forced to stick with Win11 for now due to proprietary software compatibility requirements.
Some things I’ve loved:
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CPU profiles being there by default, fantastic
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Flatpak was new to me but man, it’s handy. Nice how it bundles all the dependencies
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Drivers for everything working by default is great, no issue with the touchpad, touchscreen
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Degoogled Chrome is great for a default browser, even though I moved back to Librewolf using it. But cutting google out of the equation by default is great.
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The Welcome page is very useful (I have some suggestions for another post)
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What few bugs I had recorded to mention have been fixed by swapping from the plasma5 to plasma6 ISO, so can call this very reliable now
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Battery consumption has been good and low when just browsing or typing up documents, making it ideal for my purposes
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Attractive UI and nice wallpapers include (little touch but I like it)
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Telegram and Konsole are good bundled inclusions
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Basically came with a lot of apps I’d want to install anyway, and was up and running to how I wanted it within 30 mins or so of extra setup
Everything has just worked so far, it’s refreshing to see how Linux has matured since I last dabbled, at least in OM. The extra GUI options are the icing on the cake, especially coming from decades of Windows; makes it much easier to convert. Idk why the purists are so against it, you’ll still have the option to use CLI to do things if you want, but having GUI works better for visual learners/thinkers and doesn’t require a strong memory of commands. The strangest thing is how relatively unknown OM is. It really seems like Lunduke was the first instance of awareness for many who have found there way here. Is that intentional, like you guys want to reach a certain milestone before more marketing/outreach?
But either way, glad to have found OM, nice to be one step closer to leaving Win11 for good, and looking forward to seeing where the Devs take this project next!