OpenMandriva Install Experience

Greetings. I wanted to share my experience installing OpenMadriva to hopefully help the developers. I’ve experience with Linux from Redhat (from a 1990s Linux book) and Mandrake up to Debian and FreeBSD (not Linux, I know…).

First, my “daily driver” is Linux Mint Debian Edition with XFCE with an Irix theme, on a dual Xeon cpu (6 cores, 12 threads) at 3.0 ghz, with 32gb ram 10tb HDD, and an nvidia 1060 gpu. I’m quite happy with it except for a growing distrust for Debian and Torvalds.

The machine I attempted to install to was a quad-core i7 at 3.4ghz, 16gb ram, 2tb HDD, and onboard intel video.

Before trying to install OpenMandriva (from DVD), I installed OpenBSD. The OpenBSD install was fast and w/o glitches… but I was a bit taken aback at being left at the shell. I quickly got it booting into X11… but it did have some “missing” tools… like sudo.

But enough toying around, I really wanted to try OpenMandriva… the install went just as quickly and glitch-free. One aspect that bothered me was the drive partitioning. I didn’t want to go through the mental gymnastics of figuring how many mb to divide my HD into / and /swap, so I went with the default… my jaw dropped when I saw how many partitions it created, plus the 190gb apparently empty space it left unpartitioned right in the middle… and only 300gb for /home?

It immediately popped me into KDE, which looks nice and which was somewhat intuitive; not as intuitive as LMDE/xfce, but I could manage. Didn’t have all the tools/toys I wanted, but no problem; they can always be installed… right? I DID manage to find an Irix theme for the default KDE desktop.
I encountered some frustration, because much of the software I wanted to install either didn’t exist or kept getting conflicts with existing software.
I never got around to trying to install some of the tools I use on my LMDE machine, because I got hung up on one. Code:Blocks wasn’t to be found. I finally found it as a flatpack… but as its in a container and I can’t access other SDKs… screw it. Other programs such as Wordgrinder and w3m didn’t exist. But on the other hand, VLC installed with no hiccups.

But what wasn’t acceptable was KDE. That had to go. I haven’t liked KDE for some time; I don’t know why I just don’t like the way it works or looks…
So I spent over a day trying to install LightDM. I got XFCE installed… but on my LMDE setup, Lightdm had a menu button for switching display managers, and from there I could try different window managers. (I really wanted to try Windowmaker or gnustep, since I’d like to try out a NeXTStep look and feel).
But I saw no option (running sddm) on the login screen, to choose alternate DMs.
When I tried installing LightDM, there was a conflict caused by sddm. So, after much struggling, I rebooted into the console, removed sddm and installed lightdm. But now it would go into a blank screen for the login.
After some research, I typed into the console “startxfwm4” (iirc), and it booted to the login, and then on into xfce… happy camper time. Though i still wanted to try windowmaker or gnustep.

Then I went into dnfdragora (sp) and began selecting all the little tools and toys and wallpapers and such I was used to… I DID manage to install a delightful theme with steampunk looking titlebars straight out of the 90s. The very kind of thing I wanted, actually.
But then I bogged down; after selecting a couple dozen packages to install… I hit a wall of incompatibility conflicts. I finally gave up and called it an evening, deciding to retry OpenBSD later…
But the OpenMandriva is still on there, and I really want to make it work. I’m going to try using alien to turn a codeblocks deb file into rpm; I found wordgrinder and w3m and some of the other programs I like on github, so I can try installing them from source.

LMDE was not without its frustrations and glitches; I recently (hopefully successfully) dealt with on upgrading from 5 to 6, which left me unable to upgrade packages via apt/dpkg. And I know some of my frustration was due to my own ignorance.

Most people who install OpenMandriva will have an easy time of it, IMO. They’ll have a quick, easy graphical install, and then be able to get right to it in the KDE environment. I am generally very impressed with it, in spite of my frustrations, which is why I decided to keep working at it.

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Welcome. This topic was really to just introduce you, but okay. If you need assistance with things, please create a topic in Support. There are pinned topics you should review before doing so, so please do that as well. Thanks for giving us a chance. :slight_smile:

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This was just to relate my experience, not seek help :slight_smile:

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:+1:

Welcome to OpenMandriva!