OpenMandriva LX is a free Desktop Operating System that was created to capture the interest of first time and advanced users alike while still stimulating their creative developmental minds.
OpenMandriva has announced the release of their latest build, called OMLx 4.0 which comes with new and exciting changes. With this release, users will see several significant changes that are readily visible, and many changes that are not immediately visible.
OMLx 4.0 Plasma Desktop
With the 4.0 release, KDE Plasma has been updated to 5.15.5. The KDE web browser, Falkon, is now the default browser which reduces the memory footprint and gives a more consistent user interface. LibreOffice has also been updated, giving the user an improved look and feel since it is now completely integrated with Plasma. Another significant update comes for media. With the patents on MP3 expired, MP3 decoders and encoders have been included in the main distribution with updates to the video and audio players.
OMLx 4.0 LibreOffice
The OpenMandriva applications have also gotten some updates of their own. OM Welcome has been significantly updated with OM Control Center now being included in the main distribution which replaced the DrakX tools. OM Repository Management Tool is also now available.
Calamares includes some new features as well. There is now an option for easy partition swapping. Calamares also now checks to see whether the system is installed in a Virtualbox or real hardware and then removes any unused language for the different setup.
While there are significant changes on the front end of the operating system, there are still more behind the scenes. Some notable changes include an update to the Java stack to use OpenJDK 12 with package dependencies. Python has also been updated to 3.7.7, and the kernel has been updated to version 5.1.9 with additional performance improvements among other things.
Hardware support has also been improved with the OMLx 4.0 update. Many of the drivers have been updated with OMLx 4.0 having complete ports to aarch64 and armv7hnl platforms.
Some of the new packages that are included with the ISO packages list include Dnfdragora, Kuser, and KBackup. Dnfdragora is a graphical frontend for the package manager which replaces the old rpmdrake. Kuser is users and groups manager tool that replaces the older userdrake. KBackup is a new tool for backing up directories and files, which replaces the old draksnapshot.
Core packages updated:
- Kernel 5.1.9
- KDE Plasma: 5.15.5
- KDE Frameworks: 5.58.0
- KDE Applications: 19.04.2
- Qt Framework 5.12.3
- Systemd 242
- LLVM/clang 8.0.1
- Java 12
Main packages updated:
- LibreOffice 6.2.4
- Firefox Quantum 66.0.5
- Krita 4.2.1
- DigiKam 6.0
- Xorg 1.20.4, Mesa 19.1.0
- Calamares 3.2.7
With the 4.0 release, there will be more new options available to users. These new options and changes will be announced by OpenMandriva soon, so stay tuned!
