Over this past weekend, the OpenMandriva Association announced the final release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1, codenamed Mercury. The release announcement comes just days after the candidate release of the popular Linux distribution.
For those new to OpenMandriva, it is a fork of Mandriva Linux 2011. Development of the Mandriva Linux distribution discontinued in 2011, with most of the Mandriva development team joining the Mageia Linux, another Mandriva Linux fork, development team. The majority of the remaining Mandriva Linux development team allied with community members to form OpenMandriva.
https://twitter.com/Diogo_Travassos/status/1223755105406767106
In their release announcement, the OpenMandriva team wrote,
“OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 turned out to be a great one, but… we made it better.”
What’s New in OMLX 4.1
OpenMandriva 4.1, or OMLX 4.1, includes a default Clang LTO (Link Time Optimization) and PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) optimized build. Zypper is available as an alternative to DNF for package management, and Zstd replaces XZ for package compression. Also noteworthy is that Linux 5.5, the latest kernel, is in the mix.
Significant and notable packages updated in OMLX 4.1 include
- Calamares 3.2.17
- Chromium browser 79.0.3945.130
- DigiKam 7.0.0
- Falkon 3.1.0
- Firefox 72.0.2
- GIMP 2.10.14
- Java 13
- Kernel 5.5.0
- Kdenlive 19.12.1
- KDE Applications 19.12.1
- KDE Frameworks 5.66.0
- KDE Plasma 5.17.5
- Krita 4.2.8
- LibreOffice 6.4.0.3
- LLVM/Clang 9.0.1
- NX Firewall (replaces firewall-config)
- Qt Framework 5.14.1
- SimpleScreenRecorder 0.3.11
- SMPlayer 19.10.2
- systemd 244
- Thunderbird 68.4.1
- Virtualbox 6.1.2
OpenMandriva-specific applications in the ISO package list include Desktop Presets (om-feeling-like), a tool to customize the OMLX 4.1 Plasma desktop look and fill, along with Update Configuration (om-update-config), a tool to configure automatic updates.
“OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 turned out to be a great one, but… we made it better.”
Also included in the OMXL 4.1 repositories are alternative desktops for testing. Initial reviews of the newly released distro are overwhelmingly positive.
Conclusion
As of today, OpenMandriva is ranked at 50 on distrowatch.com where the Linux distro enjoys an average rating of 8.11 (out of 10). It is downloaded an average of 245 times each day. With the Kernel and several important packages updated, OMXL 4.1 should definitely be on the list of your ‘to do’ upgrades.
For those who want to grab the latest ISO of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1, head over to the OpenMandriva website. If you are a developer and looking for sources, you can take a look at Github.
