Ok, I’ve been looking for compare and contrasts between OpenMandriva and Mageia and so far what I am discovering is that Mageia is older code it seems like and is closer to being like RHEL but it is not built with CLANG / LLVM. OpenMandriva seems to be more forward thinking and does have the CLANG optimizations for I prefer it. Mageia does not have a rolling release I think but OpenMandriva has a rolling release model that is apparently more stable than Rawhide but just new enough to be considered a rolling release distro.
It is worth noting that ROCK does not seem to have actively maintained kernel CVE patching whereas ROME does from my understanding. I love that ROCK just works and is very stable and even on the level of Debian Stable type of stability but perhaps a little bit behind Debian Stable with some versions of things such as the kernel whereas 6.18 is stock for Debian Stable and ROCK ships with 6.14 and has a 5.15 in the main repository for ROCK. My system work well on nearly everything out of the box so I am debating whether it is worth it to switch to ROME for the kernel security features perhaps. I know that upgrading to ROME would mean potentially having to do so in a tty from the terminal but that’s okay. I’m used to things like Slackware or Gentoo so no big deal. I guess my real questions are whether I will lose alot of stability in doing this and if the kernel patches for security will be notable, or I suppose a better question would be, on a Dell Latitude 5300 laptop will ROME work out well if I decide to swap my repos from ROCK to rolling and temporarily disable the third party repos ? Am I going to gain a security advantage in doing that and is there a way to have newer kernels in ROCK which maintain bugfixes like LTS and backports ?
I don’t know that I would just switch from ROCK to ROME right now. We generally test this before telling someone that it is safe to do so. The last person that tried it ended up having to do a fresh install. We need to ping @ben79 to ask more on this.
As far as backporting the kernel and security patches for ROCK, that is done, when needed.
As for ROME, the last time we rolled was February and we are about to roll again. That is pretty stable as far as I am concerned.
In general no. People seem to get worked up over the CVE’s without know what the are and importantly what the are not. Also you could stay on Rock and install ROME kernel, if everything works use it, if not remove it, simple.
IMO: At some point users need to start bugging the OM Contributor group to do more timely upgrades of both ROME and Rock. I believe we are past that point. However I have ROME and Rock partitions on my laptop and they work just fine.
I’d probably stay on ROCK if the laptop is already running well and you don’t actually need the newer packages. ROME sounds attractive if you want newer kernels and software, but I wouldn’t switch purely for that without being comfortable with the occasional extra troubleshooting. If everything works fine on ROCK, stability is worth a lot, especially on a machine you rely on every day.