Hope you and other users find this helpful. This is a mix of my personal opinion and my attempt to speak as a member of the OM contributor group. Any errors are mine alone. Be forewarned OpenMandriva Lx is a Community distribution of Linux. We are not bashful about telling users if you want things to be better help us do it. None of us are being paid.
The ROME Plasma slim isos are minimal but graphical installs. You will find them here.
Personally I would agree. My official response is using GUI package managers for OM is a waste of effort. It easy and fast to use dnf commands from Konsole (terminal). People who do this usually have far fewer issues. Among the GUI managers dnfdrake is clearly the best IMO. Doing package management is an easy way for less technical users to learn the command line a bit and get comfortable using it. I would do this in any Linux distro.
dnf downgrade does this. In a lot of instances user will need to manually download the older package/s. Post here and we can help with that.
There may be other ways to do this I am not aware of.
The alternative desktops are Community spins not contributions from OM devs. It remains to be seen how well these can be maintained. If users that use them step up and help the people making these I predict success. A Community distro depends on that Community for it’s success. (OM devs do the Plasma and LXQt releases.) The Plasma slim effort is the work of a contributor @rugyada. The Gnome3 release and I think xfce4 are the work of contributor/developer @AngryPenguin. I appreciate their efforts.
Explained above in this thread by @bero.
IMO in some important way I believe OMLx is better than any of those. But I am obviously prejudiced.
The ARM and soon to come RISCV are considered by OM devs to be architectures of the future. As OM’s mission is to be a very forward looking distributor of open source software this is very much a part of the OMLx project. As @bero says above dropping these means losing developers. If everyone involved is a volunteer then OM has to allow them to do what they want to do at least part of the time.
I am not sure of this but I believe this is the opposite of the goals of OM developers. Things like FlatEarth, excuse me FlatPak, create a hodge podge of conflicting library packages. This can be detrimental to system performance. One of the unique things about OMLx is that if a package is in our repos it was built by OM in our own build system (ABF or Automated Build Farm). Our sources are all under OM control here.
To me personally this is a very important point: OpenMandriva the distro (OMLx) follows the lead and direction of OpenMandriva Association council and the OM Technical Committee. The TC-committee consists of OM devs and other contributors. We have no committment to follow the lead of any other Linux distro, we do collaborate with other distros and projects. There has been some collaboration with Mageia. My observation is that opportunities for such collaboration are limited. One distro being noticeably more forward looking and aggressively upgrading software on OMLx Cooker our development platform. The other group prefers a more conservative approach. FWIW OMLx Rock is our more conservative release point appropriate for business and server use.
Workflow is Cooker>ROME(rolling)>Rock. There are multiple testing step before packages get to ROME. Then the best possible testing takes place by ROME users using this software in real world usage plus another testing step before any package gets to Rock. Similar to Rawhide>Fedora>RHEL or openSUSE Factory>openSUSE Tumbleweed/Leap>SLED/SLES. There are other similar examples.
Another way of looking at this is that for the most part the same packages are available in all versions of OMLx. Cooker having the newest then ROME and Rock having the older versions.
If you use Cooker you need to have the patience and ability to deal with problems. We guarantee that Cooker gets broken at times. Things naturally get broken in the development process, this is normal and expected. This is true of any development platform I have encountered.