Thinking about switching to OpenMandriva

Coffee break Introduce yourself
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I knew about OM for a while now, I heard about it from Bryan Lunduke. I have Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon currently installed alongside a heavily stripped Windows 10. I am thinking of switching to OM on my main machine, seeing that I will have more storage space soon. However I have no pressing issues or questions with that setup, I want to talk about the server setup.

I am thinking about switching to the server version of OpenMandriva on a server I run. The current setup is an older Dell Optiplex 7010 (16GB RAM) running PeppermintOS with Playit, Minecraft Fabric 1.21.5, RustDesk/AnyDesk and a qemu VM, which is running with 4GB RAM PeppermintOS with beta Minecraft, Playit, Recaf and AnyDesk/RustDesk. Previously had run the host on Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon.

I want to list two major issues I have run into with other distros, in the hopes that perhaps the community can let me know how OM handles these issues.

PeppermintOS kills processes outright when it runs out of memory. Sometimes it even kills important processes like AnyDesk or even the DE causing it to log out. I manage the VM remotely and this means players can no longer access the server, the server shut down unsafely, and I can no longer work on the VM, until the owner logs the VM back in.

Linux Mint locks up and freezes whenever it runs out of memory. It does not seem to use the swap at all.

Does OM have a large swap, and does it use it properly? Does it kill processes when it runs out of memory? Does OM accept *.deb packages? (probably a dumb question but the off chance the answer is “yes” that would make switching much easier) and if so, which version of OM do you recommend? Please let me know, I want to give OM a shot.

P.S.: Any anecdotal notes or input would also be warmly accepted. If you haven’t run into any issues similar to the info above then please let me know. Thank you!

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Welcome! We are happy to see you and hope you will decide to make this your home.

That said, those are great questions. Rock 6.0 is about to be released, so hang tight, or hang loose.

I leave the questions for the experts.

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Welcome to OpenMandriva and our forum. This forum is for users of OpenMandriva Linux operating systems.

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You accidentally pasted the message twice

Thank you for the response though

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I had to look again, but yes, you are right.

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You seem to be trying to do gaming on a old computer with 4GB RAM. Sometimes the hardware just is not adequate. Maybe if you learn more about how to use swap that can be made to work better. The problems with PeppermintOS and Linux Mint seem to be similar. I would suggest learning more about swap and how to use it to do what you want and working with an operating system you are familiar with before trying OMLx.

OMLx is different from any other Linux distro. That is important to know. Swap is a area where documentation from other distos does generally work here. Arch Linux Wiki Swap might be a good place to start reading about this.

Desktop versions of OMLx by default have zram0 I think it is set to 1/2 the size of available memory. Swappiness is set to 60 by default. Arch Linux Wiki zram. I do not know if the server versions do this or how the handle swap. I would suggest contacting OM devs at OM-Chat for more about the server versions.

No. OMLx uses .rpm packages and dnf package manager, but do not think that means OMLx is “like” Fedora, OMLx does things it’s own way.

Today (16-04-2025) for an individual user: ROME Plasma6 X11 x86_64 #3856

For server versions talk with OM devs.

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Fair enough. Does dnf include OpenJDK11 and OpenJDK8, and can I run Linux executables with no problems?

And is it possible to either disable over-commitment of memory, or disable oom-killer?

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You can adjust the size of the ZRam swap file in the

/usr/lib/systemd/zram-generator.conf

[zram0]
zram-size = min(ram/2, 8192)

I could raise mine if I wanted to, but I have had no need so far.

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Like @ben79 said, you can ask the devs some questions in the cooker room if you like.
https://matrix.to/#/#openmandriva-cooker:matrix.org
Element seems to be the least painful client.

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[quote=“SeveringHams, post:7, topic:7176”]
Does dnf include OpenJDK11 and OpenJDK8,[/quote]

dnf is a package manager it does not include any packages. Repositories contain the packages. There are java-11-openjdk and java-1.8.0-openjdk packages. You can check for yourself in the repository for rolling/main/release repo (ROME uses rolling repos).

If you do it correctly. You are asking a question that implies that everyone in Linux does things exactly the same way. They don’t. Sometimes you will need to change things like paths or other details, or create symlinks to dependencies. This is not unique to OpenMandriva.

I believe both of those would be yes, but this is a question for OM devs. Or possibly Peppermint or Linux Mint devs.

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That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you for the help, I will try it out!

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For ROME

Do not do a sudo dnf update as this will break your system.

sudo dnf clean all ; dnf clean all ; sudo dnf distro-sync --refresh --allowerasing 2>&1| tee dsync2-log.txt

each and every time. :grinning:

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Duly noted, that seems very important

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@SeveringHams Thanks for the questions. You made me think…

IMO what is a bad idea is trying a new Linux distro (any distro) a person is not familiar with and right away making a lot of changes. One needs to install it, learn it, learn the community of it, and then proceed with changes. I mean spend a few days, read the Release Notes, and be aware of other docs if you need them, not some long drawn out process.

And by all means ask for advice before doing things or help if you need to. Helping users 'R us.

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Also important to read is whole Newcomers Tips

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