I think @ycom1 has made some very good points.
I’ve never used OM before but installed ROME in a VM and I was very impressed, also compared to Mageia 9 which is less polished imho. From an outside perspective I think that:
- The first impression is great, clean desktop, good welcome app, nice installer, good graphics while booting and in SDDM, and most importantly: Discover and Flatpaks are preinstalled
- I would offer an optional “Minimal install” which comes with only the very basic apps.
- Package management is a bit confusing, I’ve seen four applications, “Discover”, “dnfdragora”, “dnfdrake”, and “update system” (which just runs the update script in Konsole). I think ideally Discover is enough, plus a repository manager in the control center.
- Add some kind of rollback feature for when an update breaks something. openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots but I’m sure there’s other (simpler) approaches as well.
- Drop the alternative desktops to make it easier for the developers. I bet most people who are interested in OM prefer KDE! There’s tons of distros with GNOME already, but few with KDE as a first class citizen, so this is really something where OM can be different. I don’t think a GNOME fan will go for OM instead of e.g. Fedora or openSUSE?
- Drop the stable version to make it easier for the developers. I doubt that there’s many people who use OM on their server. And I don’t think anyone will see OM in the same league as Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, …
- You might as well drop the ARM version then
- You might be able to drop some applications that are available as Flatpaks. I know some people don’t like the idea of having some libraries/dependencies installed twice (RPM and Flatpak) but I mean on the OMA Github you have only 7 people listed so I would prioritize getting the base system polished and up to date and outsource a lot of other stuff to Flatpaks. That’s the general direction anyway, e.g. Fedora Kinoite, openSUSE MicroOS, …
- See if there’s any way of working together or merging with the Mageia community. I’m not sure what’s the reason for the split - do these two groups hate each other or something? - but it just seems a bit silly to have these two distros with the same origin and same goals. Mageia seems to have the bigger community but they are struggling to release version 9 so that indicates to me that both are spread thin.