First of all Hello to everyone that decides to bother reading this.
OM is my first Linux distro and pretty much the deciding factor is Lunduke “praising it” by being “non-woke” or at least apolotical. For those that just left, have a great day.
Now for the rest of the reasons why i tried Linux (not OM specifically), its pretty simple really, i have been “battling” against Microsoft for a while with all sorts of programs that should minimize spying, forced updating and quite a few other things that i dont even remember now.
Another significant reason, is that i run both AMD CPU and GPU, since i heard Windows doesnt do it “justice” (as in apparently windows is slowing both of them down)
Only to learn that AMD supports only specific distros of Linux (I dont know why i didnt even check which ones)
Sort of final reason was to experience “having control” as is pretty much always brought up in discussion around “why Linux”
Those would be all the “major” reasons why i switched to Linux from many, many years of windows although not permamently as i have it on Dual-boot because of insecurity and a sort of anxiety too i guess?
Now finally back to OM and my experience with it.
Honestly? FIrst impressions were godly, very smooth installment of the OS itself and many, many times faster than Windows. Along with installing steam from the welcome menu
There ends the “godly” experience and enters… anoyyance?
After a while in the “Welcome” from OM my eyes started hurting due to the all white style of “Welcome” and no way to switch it to dark mode (at least i havent found a way)
I wanted to install Vivaldi, went to the browser in “Welcome” from OM, and checked VIvaldi + Brave as back-up, clicked “OK” only for it do… nothing at all?? Multiple times, no promt, nothing.
So i went to the default browser to look for “VIvaldi linux download” (yes i know obvious WIndows user behaviour) only to fail multiple times due to the default browser for some ungodly reason not having any search engine set by default??
After a while i finally had EUREKA moment, and went to setting to set default engine. Finally my struggle with installing Vivaldi was complete.
After my first struggle, i wanted Discord… Yet again, i went to browser and searched “DIscord linux download” which i did but installment was unsuccesful, it downloaded something, it tried to run but after waiting for few minutes and nothing happening i searched for other ways to make Discord installment succesfull.
During this process i learned about “Discover” (app i guess?) Where i searched Discord and finally my second struggle went away.
Last two things, i would personally say are a bit too much “complicated” for (as i have seen many times Linux being praised for) a new user to Linux.
Overall the switch wasnt that complicated as i feared, even tho i have encoureted some problems.
Compared to windows there are two major differences
No bloatware as Windows likes.
“Control of the system” where… its complicated but very honestly, windows gives better “feeling of control” than LInux (Not sure how it is different from distro to distro but i am guessing that its simillar) due to Windows installment specifically asking you (most of the time) where you want to install what program, as to here. It was just : Install this “install complete”… Okay where the heck did you install it to???
Which i seriously questioned the meme mocking windows and its install process being exactly this situation.
And this is the end with me hoping that this stays up, without being taken down
The welcome app should have had a pop-up asking for your password, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t work for you.
Your Linux experience will be much better if you learn just four terminal commands.
dnf search name sudo dnf install name sudo dnf remove name sudo dnf dsync
Replace ‘name’ with an actual name or keyword to search for, install, or remove software that we have in our repositories. The dsync command will update everything on your system.
Any trouble you run into, or if you have any questions, we’ll try our best to help.
Edit: Perhaps the first thing to do in problem solving after installation would be to be sure system is up to date. You can use the “System Update” utility which you can access from OM-Welcome:
Then if the problem is with an application you can run it from Konsole (terminal) for instance with om-welcome you use that as the command to execute the application. The output that occurs could be useful in problem solving.
Hope I am not throwing to much at once to a new user.
“You are using OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 (Vanadium) Rock with kernel 6.14.2 desktop.”
When i opem OM welcome, that is what it says.
As for real version… latest Rock? ( sorry, i dont know where i can find that)
eal version
As for system being up to date, thats the first thing i did after i got to the “configuration” of OM Welcome, where there is option to update thy system, which is what i did.
Edit : Forgot to thank you for the welcome and potential help, and sorry i forgot.
For installing say Vivaldi from OM-Welcome it first should pop up the “Software Repository Selector” where you need to select the Vivaldi repository and click OK, then it will ask for root or administrator password.
And that is all it does. Which I admit is not intuitive for a new user coming from Windows. Especially since the dialog window in OM-Welcome says “Install from from third party repository”. But it only installs the repository not the actual browser. So I have to agree complicated for someone coming from Windows. Then you could open dnfdragora and type in “vivaldi” and install the browser from there:
Cant exactly remember whether it asked for admin password as i tried it yesterday. But its more than likely that it did.
It just didnt do what i expected it to, even more so since i first installed steam, which did full install from the OM welcome rather than “add repository”
I understand that. As far as I know if the software is in OpenMandriva repositories then the OM-Welcome does install that. If the software is in third party repositories like Vivaldi, Brave, or Google Chrome then it only will add the 3rd party repository and the user needs to install that. I do not think the wording in OM-Welcome makes that clear to someone coming from Windows. Edit: I am not sure how to word this better, I leave that to other folks.
Note: And users should be aware that 3rd party repository software is controlled by that 3rd party.
If you click on the 3 dots (…) beneath a post on the right-hand side, you can bookmark it, and to go back to it, you click on your profile menu at the top right of the page, you’ll see a “bookmark” icon that will give links to all the posts that you’ve bookmarked.
Thank you for trying to help tho at the end of that point i did say that “my second struggle went away”.
Its understandable since it happened multiple times already meaning that my post was either too long or badly written
Discover may work for downloading some apps (usually flatpaks), but make sure you do not try to update your system with it. Long story short, discover is an app specific to KDE (OM’s flagship desktop environment), but it isn’t configured to work specifically with OM.
The updating that Discover does uses different commands and has messed up other users systems. To be safe, try and use the terminal (Konsole) to update things. Coming from Windows, it might be a little bit intimidating, but you’ll learn it pretty quickly and things will work out much better
I get the joke, with terminal being scary… albeit not exactly the case for me
Anyway, thank you for the welcome. As for updating… i think i will be doing it via the OM Welcome, until i get anoyyed by doing it all the time and learn the terminal code for it.
You really don’t need to update that often. I do it daily just out of habit from using arch Linux for years, but you’ll be just fine weekly or even monthly
