Nate Drake relives Mandriva Linux’s heyday with its programmer and community-developed successor. Plasma has never looked so good.
M any Linux users have fond memories of Mandriva Linux, an RHEL-based distro that was discontinued in 2011. OpenMandriva was born from its ashes through the efforts of former Mandriva developers and the coding community.
The first version of OpenMandriva hit the internet a little over 10 years ago, and since then, the OS has consistently received positive reviews for its broad appeal and ease of use.
Traditionally, the OpenMandriva project has concentrated on fixed releases, such as Iodine Rock 5.0, which is the focus of this review. However, in January 2023, the team also released ROME, a rolling release that contains the latest stable version of all OpenMandriva packages.
The current version of OpenMandriva uses the KDE Plasma 5.27.9 desktop, the last distro to do so before the upgrade to KDE Plasma 6. The OS also includes KDE Gear 23.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.112.0.
ISO downloads are offered as an Extended version, which comes bundled with software for most day-today tasks and weighs around 3GB, and a Slim version containing the bare essentials, such as the Dolphin file manager and graphical package installer Dnfdrake.
Outside of component updates, this is the first fixed point release that merges the / and /usr filesystems, improving efficiency and compatibility.
At the time of writing, the distro is only available for x86_64 and znver1 builds, but there are plans for both ARM and RISC-V ports.
Current versions use version 6.6 of the Linux kernel. We discovered this on first boot through the OM Welcome screen. This is also where we discovered that HT/SMT NICE is enabled by default to improve performance on PCs that support hyperthreading.
The welcome guide also pointed us to OM Feeling Like, which enables you to configure the desktop to have a look and feel similar to other operating systems, such as Mac OS Mojave or Windows 10.
Checking the Global Theme in System Settings, we found that only the default OpenMandriva and Breeze themes are preinstalled,
