OpenMandriva Lx beta has been released. This is the first beta edition of what will become the first stable release of OpenMandriva Lx, a distribution built around the latest K Desktop Environment (KDE) and desktop technologies from ROSA Desktop and what’s left of the old Mandriva.
Like Mageia, OpenMandriva is a community-driven distribution. Which means your input is more than welcome, in any manner you are able to help.
This beta release ships with the following main components: Linux kernel 3.11.5, KDE 4.11, LibreOffice 4.1.1.2, Firefox 24, Thunderbird 17.0.9 and a host of other productivity and desktop management applications.
From the official release announcement:
Lx Beta comes with KDE 4.11, with a focus on a clean and unified desktop. This release comes with a set of four (!) launchers — Lancelot, KickOff, SimpleWelcome and Homerun — for you to try and give feedback. Eventually we’ll settle for just one, the winner based on your feedback.
So one very important thing that the developers need your input is in helping them choose which one of four menus should be the default. That is, aside from any other suggestions you may have. I’ve looked at all four menu options and ranked them in order of user-friendliness and how well and easy they help me find and do stuff on the desktop.
But before I get to that, here are a few screen shots of the login screen and the default desktop. If you’ve used ROSA Desktop or Mandriva Linux, you should be very familiar with them. This screen shot of the login screen.
And this one is of the default desktop.
Out of the box, there are four virtual desktop, or workspaces. This screen shots show the Expo view of the desktops.
Aside from the login screen and desktop, here are a few other aspects of the default installation that I like. A graphical interface for managing services or daemons on a modern desktop distribution is always a good idea. Not everybody wants to mess with systemctl, so I’m happy that OpenMandriva Lx will ship with a graphical service manager pre-installed.
At a time when Ubuntu-based distributions lack a working parental control system, it’s good to see that OpenMandriva still maintains support for the parental control system it inherited from Mandriva.
There’s a separation of KDE management applications (found in the KDE Control Center) from the custom OpenMandriva system management applications inherited from Mandriva. I think some of these tools need to be updated, especially the software installation module, but I’ll leave that discussion for a later time.
I wish they just put their effort into SolusOS or a similar distro that desperately needs help instead of reinventing Mandriva again.
Well, SolusOS is dead. Why did they even split form Mint?
OpenMandriva, in many respects, is better. They just need to update the MCC tools.
Are you sure SolusOS ever had anything to do with Mint? I don’t think so… Anyway, it wouldn’t be dead if there was anyone to work on it. But, unrelated to SolusOS, who is the target audience for another reinvention of a long forgotten distro? We already have Mageia, mind you. I value all effort put into Linux or any open source, I just think this one could be more useful elsewhere. Can you really see this distro surviving a few years?
That’s the nature of Free Software. You can’t stop anyone from starting their own distribution of software project. If they succeed, great, if not, well…
I would like people to focus more on applications, then distributions, because I think we have more than enough of those. Most of these distributions don’t even bring anything new to the table, but, like I said, you can’t stop freedom.
I don’t think SolusOS ever had anything to do with Mint, in the first place. Anyway, it would not have died if it had people to work on it. But, most importantly and unrelated to Solus or any other distro, who is the target audience for yet another reinvention of a long forgotten Mandriva? We already have Mageia, filling the gap quite well, mind you.
As I said, I highly value any and all effort invested in Linux or other open source. I just think in this specific case it could have been utilized better.
Oops, sorry for the double post. My internet hicked up.
And yes, I fully agree on all points, and I too would very much love if the applications got more attention. And drivers maybe even more.
I value of everybody’s effort, but who is the audience for this distro?