What sets OpenMandriva apart

Coffee break
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Hi all,
I keep seeing people say here and there that OM is the best distro they’ve used or that it’s diffrent from other distros. I am really enjoying using OM and the community is great. I mostly used linuxmint but have played with most of the well know and some lesser known distros. I find that once iv’e got something set up apps, themeing etc all distros seem more or less the same. However I think that says more about my lack knowledge and understanding than it does about linux distros. As I am trying to learn more about and understand better linux in general and OpenMandriva in particular, politics aside what is it for you that sets OM apart, what makes a difference day to day using this distro over another. I was wnted to ask this question because of a comment in the distrowatch topic

I would be more than willing to leave a review there but i’m not really sure what to say, maybe your answers will help me to better appreciate and even better use OM. Also just a fun way to show the OM team some appreciation.

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When I started looking for a new distro it was because of all the CoC movements and activism. My previous distro was part of the BTW suite and before that it was deb based distros. No matter what I chose, there was always something missing or a question unanswered. Will everything about what I’m using be worth the time investment?

It was only when I thought back to my first encounter with using a Linux distribution that I went back to OMLx. I emailed the prez about it before I tried it and discovered what you all discovered only recently. The community put the project and the end product first. Music to my ears.

When I first installed it, it ran like every other Linux distro I have used with a couple caveats. Steam was broken and the nvidia driver was not maintained (actively). This is where the amazing part happened. Since 2001, I had never used a Linux distribution with a community that made contributing to it and learning that process accessible. With the help of a very patient and knowledgeable community, we were able to fix Steam and get nvidia (despite their feelings about the company) back on track. Since then, I try to help where I can and sometimes irritate people in the process. I mean well, I truly do.

Needless to say, I came here for the process and stayed here for the people. I have come full circle back to where I began my FOSS journey. With the Linux distribution truly made for everyone.

Thank you, OMA.

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I actually switched because ive been debugging something and needed a random distro to check if it was my hardware, and i saw lunduke mention this distro id never heard of before
I got sold when i saw its an independent distro with a long history, and its rolling release, and uses dnf, and supports rpms, which is like my dream distro
When i installed it i had also gotten a new nvidia gpu, and they said they needed testers, which really makes me happy.

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Well Rich, I started with SuSE 9.0 but now I am considered “rotten flesh” over there, because I refuse to carry their flags and wave them. I’m a 30+ year I.T. guy, but I am a Christian, white, straight male. I don’t care what they are, but they certainly care what I am. So, I left there looking for a home. I think I found it. :grinning:

One distro is much like the next. Linux is Linux, no matter which box you stuff it into. Stable or cutting edge, it’s just Linux. One is better than the other? Horse hockey. The community is the difference. The community is all that matters.

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OpenMandriva is not based on any other distro. Where Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, and a thousand others are all piggybacking on the work Debian does, and dozens of distros are just Arch with some glitter (I still love Garuda). OpenMandriva has their own spin on RPM packaging, maintain completely independent repositories, and the OpenMandriva Association is focussed solely on the software. Many of the newcomers, myself included, came here because of the distinct lack of ideological driven politics or agendas, pure software for the sake of making a good distro.

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I wanted to switch from Windows and with the end of Windows 10 near, I looked for alternatives. I tried Arch in the summer and it was good. I just wanted too much at once and tried to get everything perfectly working on my notebook, but as a linux noob that wasn’t possible and I still needed a working machine for work. So I paused my linux journey, but learned a lot.

Around Christmas I thought again about how I would make the switch and decided to set up a home server and move from OneDrive to self-hosted Nextcloud as a first step. That worked great and while I was thinking about the next step, Lunduke made his video and I thought, I’ll just try it, since I don’t want my next OS to force something onto me that I don’t want and support values that I don’t.

So I set it up on a mac mini that I had lying around and just played around with OM. And it was love at first sight. It was easy like Linux Mint, but was not simplistic or “outdated” like Linux Mint. It was a rolling distribution like Arch, but not cutting edge with 50 new updates every day and breaking something every now and then. It feels “professional” and solid like a RHEL distribution, but without IBM and Red Hat. And on top of that the community is awesome! So responsive, helpful, feels familiar and makes me want to learn more about linux, distributions, the kernel, packaging, etc. And everyone values the tech foremost. For me it feels like my 2000s, where I was a teen playing around with computers, had freedom to explore and wanted to learn.

And I feel the excitement and love for OM in the core team, which gives me confidence in its future.

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I am glad to hear that your transition away from Windows is going well. Part of that is because you went about it in a thoughtful and level headed way. You did some research and learned some things. You took a pause when it was practical to do so. When you came back you learned additional skills that will serve you well on your Linux journey. I wish more people would do this rather than the usual rant that goes something like “I tried Linux for 2 whole hours and it was just terrible!”

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For me personally it’s the more subtle stuff like being packaged with clang-compiled kernel and not being based on any big distro (as in deb/rhel). And a pretty good repository (with Audacity and some other packages actually being kept up to date compared to the weird version freezes of concurrent fedora packages)

To be fair once things are set up the experience is barely different compared to other distros and mostly boils down to DE stuff at that point. Obviously some caveats and less polished out details here and there compared to something like Fedora (which is in all fairness backed up by IBM/RH and a way bigger community, and considering the size difference in development resources OM is doing remarkably well)

And the branding looks magnificent, I’m honestly obsessed with the logo and I draw it down any time I can lol

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I want to make a topic describing my experience so far in more detail, but perhaps I can summarize it here for now.

The main reason I am here other than any other distro, is because I don’t wanna use something where the devs force, promote, or otherwise speak a bunch of political stuff that has no place in software development. Technology is for everyone, like food; why do we need to put agendas behind it? I feel like even distros and their communities has become places people want to speak their minds and promote their ideologies, and I am just not happy with that, especially if they go directly against me as person, or against my faith. Ideally, I want something neutral in this regard, that at the very least doesn’t promote politics, but especially that won’t censor me for being different or for thinking different.

There is no action without a reaction; because of their recent push of the left side for all that they promote, I have begun to actively hope it fails wherever it goes. Not only that, most of the stuff there is harmful to all ages, especially children, but everyone who has breath in their lungs. I cannot support such a thing, and I will stand against it, even if that means not using an OS or participating into a community.

That aside, I have to be honest, most of the time everything feels so solid in OpenMandriva that I don’t see much difference to other distros. I can get the Plasma I like to work and function the same, most of the programs I need are available and do work through Flatpak, I barely ever need to add any third-party repo. So it works like everything else. However…

One thing I have noticed about OMA is that, perhaps people say it is less polished than others, but there are some parts which are better than MANY other distros I used. For instance: the cursor stays the same as the system’s in Flatpak applications. In other places I just have to settle for the oversized Adwaita one! That is a level of polish, isn’t it? I like that a lot.

Another perhaps more useful thing is that, being a musician, OMA by default brings a setting that benefits me in my audio work. It’s a file that naturally increases priority for audio applications, so that they don’t get sent to sleep or something similar, that ends up creating pops and clicks on my audio recordings, be it OBS or anywhere else. This is something I SUFFER a lot with in other distros, and that alone is reason for me to be here than elsewhere. Audio should just work, period. Kudos for OMA developers for not overlooking this one. I really appreciate this.

I am really happy I see someone mention the logo. I kept thinking of the logo and how I wanted that on my computer even though I was using other distros. Sure, Arch/Artix/Void is cool, but I wanted OpenMandriva. So here I am!

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