Born from the ashes of Mandriva Linux, OpenMandriva Lx is an increasingly popular Linux distribution that many users like for the simplicity it has to offer, with many usually committing to using it long-term.
It's offered in two distinct editions, one is “Rock” which is a stable release distro that receives major upgrades periodically, and the other is “ROME”, which was introduced back in 2023, that follows a rolling release approach.
In a recent announcement, its developers have announced the new OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 release, which comes bearing many gifts for both its loyal users, and prospective new users.
So, let's take a closer look at it.
🆕 OpenMandriva ROME 24.07: What's New?
Powered by a customized version of Linux kernel 6.10, OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 ships with KDE Plasma 6.1.3 as the default desktop environment for its flagship variant.
Even though many distros have been making the jump to Wayland by default, OpenMandriva's developers deem Wayland to be not mature enough to warrant a complete switch for most users.
They are sticking with the dependable X11 session, and have also noted that booting the standalone Wayland ISOs on VirtualBox will most likely cause a black screen. It does, however, work well on QEMU with KVM.
In a bid to make the user on-boarding process simpler, the developers have merged the modules from “oma-welcome” and “om-control-center” into one “OM Welcome” application that allows users to configure the system and add new software.
They have also worked on bringing support for AMD ROCm, an AI graphics generation plugin for Krita, re-enabled support for JPEG-XL, and have included the “proton” and “proton-experimental” variants of Wine for making Proton available outside Steam.
To further complement this release, the developers have included many updated applications, such as LibreOffice 24.2.5, a de-Googled Chromium 126.0.6478.182, Falkon 24.05.2, and more.
There are many other updated packages too, such as:
- glibc 2.39
- GCC 14.1.0
- Mesa 24.1.4
- Systemd 255.7
- LLVM/Clang 18.1.8
Outlining their plans, the devs have mentioned that they are working on a RISC-V port for OpenMandriva, which they intend to introduce with the upcoming release, and that builds for aarch64 devices are arriving soon.
You can learn more about the ROME 24.07 release in the announcement blog.
📥 Download OpenMandriva ROME 24.07
Alongside the flagship KDE Plasma flavor, there are two other flavors, one is equipped with LXQt 2.0.0, and the other is equipped with GNOME 46.3.
You can get any of those variants from the SourceForge page for OpenMandriva ROME, where you will also find separate Wayland and AMD-only znver1 ISO images.
The latter of which is tailored to take advantage of processors such as Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC.
For existing users, you can run the following command to upgrade:
$ sudo dnf clean all ; dnf clean all ; dnf repolist
$ sudo dnf --allowerasing distro-syncThough, a fresh installation is recommended by the developers for running Plasma 6 smoothly. If you run into any issues with this release, the official wiki is the place to be.
💬 Do let me know in the comments below if you try out this release.
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