Distribution
OpenMandriva Lx 24.12
Nate Drake explores the rolling release of this Mandriva-derived distro. Is it a worthy successor or just another frivolous fork?
IN BRIEF
Mandriva’s legacy lives on with this distro’s slick setup and comprehensive welcome screen. Plasma 6 also runs nicely with OM’s bespoke apps. The wiki is well laid out, but with some conflicting information.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz Mem: 2GB HDD: 10GB Builds: x86_64, ARM64, i586
T his distro is a fork of ROSA, itself a fork of Mandriva Linux, which was discontinued in 2011. Former developers then teamed up with the community to create OpenMandriva Lx. While it traditionally issues fixed releases, as of 2023 the project has implemented a rolling release branch, code-named ROME. Spins are available of the latest version running Gnome, LXQt Qt6, Plasma 5 and COSMIC 1.0 alpha. There’s also a version running Plasma 6 with Wayland, but we chose the 3.2GB ISO of the X11 version, as the notes state it would run better in our VirtualBox VM.