So, I’ve been hearing some news in regards to many distros being woke recently from Lunduke Journals, while it’s interesting, it’s kinda worrying and concerning because, despite me being a privacy conscious individual, kinds start to influence the distribution around that, OpenSUSE can’t elect anyone because they banned people who are right wing, Debian leaving X/Twitter because of their diversity policies, Red Hat Inc. IBM, and Fedora, especially GNOME, are starting to implement AI, which I have no idea if they are gonna collect data on it’s fellow users. So, I want to ask questions if it’s okay:
Is OpenMandriva privacy respecting (distro-wise)? And if so, does it take security seriously and has a strong security focus?
Is OpenMandriva Woke? In any shape or form? (I know it is not woke, but I wanted to make sure it’s not faked by Lunduke Journals, and yes I came from Lunduke)
Is OpenMandriva getting popular recently? If you don’t know if it is gaining popularity then skip this question, otherwise just answer if you are sure.
Is OpenMandriva Association a good organization? Does it have any past history of any controversy or itself as a distro?
Is it recommended for people who are privacy conscious? Does it fit for my needs: Rolling Release, Security, Privacy, General Desktop, Intermediate experience, localized, integrated store for both flatpaks and system packages, popular + great documentation.
Is there anything to mention or say something important to the distro, association, or the community itself?
Now, the rest is obvious to me, I’ve tried the distro myself several times, but I can’t seem to fathom the idea of a popular distro since I keep switching to a distro of choice, so I am curious if this is the right for me to make it as my main distro.
1 - There is no extra telemetry baked in like Fedora and Manjaro tried to do. The only info the devs get is what you offer willingly on the forums and matrix chat. OM ships with a completely de-googled chromium browser for user data security and privacy.
2 - Not woke. No bans getting tossed around based on user opinions/politics. OM is not pushing right-wing politics, it is just politics-free within the project. Your personal political beliefs have no real bearing on your standing within the OM community.
3 - There are A LOT of new users rolling in from watching Lunduke’s videos, that is how I emded up here. Over 25% of forum users joined just within the last 30 days.
4 - I don’t know for sure, but I would assume that it is pretty good. They make no political statements and focus solely on building a distro that they like. They do not have any corporate sponsors to cater to, so everything is done with the user in mind.
5 - Take your own measures to harden your system with apparmor or selinux, setup your firewall, don’t click on sketchy links on the internet. IMO, this is not distro-specific. I can make Ubuntu private and secure, and I can make Kali or Tails as insecure as windows. Yes, it is rolling, and rolls much faster if you are ok with enabling the developmemt repositories. Ships KDE as the default, and has good support for LXQt. I avoid software store GUI, I do all package managing through the terminal. It is gaining popularity, and many of us are contributing to documentation and working with the devs to expand the wiki.
6 - Exceptional? This shouldn’t be a ground-breaking idea, but for some crazy reason it is. This distro focuses on building a good distro rather than forcing international political agendas into their operations.
I see, also another thing to mention: Does it strive to be innovative? Latest technologies implementations? I know there is a Cooker or the Rolling distro, but does it also focus on that as well?
OpenMandriva was the first, or one of the first, distros to switch to Clang.
There are separate repositories for Ryzen optimized package builds, because as time rolls on AMD and Intel have taken very different approaches to the x86 architecture.
OpenMandriva is the first distro ever built with Clang, starting with OMLx 3.x development cycle in early 2016, even before Android switched its compilers.
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