OpenMandriva Lx 3.0



OpenMandriva is a member of the Mandriva (formally Mandrake Linux) family of Linux distributions. OpenMandriva strives to be a newcomer friendly, desktop operating system. The latest release, version 3.0, features version 5.6 of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the Calamares system installer. This release of OpenMandriva was compiled using the Clang compiler which is unusual for a Linux distribution as most distributions use the GNU Compiler Collection to build their software. From the end-user's perspective the choice of compiler will probably have no practical impact, but it does suggest the OpenMandriva team sees either a practical or philosophical benefit to using the liberally licensed Clang compiler.



OpenMandriva is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds for the x86 architecture. I downloaded the project's 64-bit build which is approximately 1.8GB in size. Booting from the project's media brings up a menu asking if we would like to start a live desktop session or launch the Calamares system installer. Taking the live option brings up a graphical configuration wizard which asks us a handful of questions. We are asked to select our preferred language from a list, accept a license agreement, select our keyboard's layout from a list and confirm our time zone. With these steps completed, the wizard disappears and the Plasma desktop loads. The desktop displays an application menu, task switcher and system tray at the bottom of the screen. The wallpaper is a soft blue and, on the desktop, we find an icon which will launch the Calamares system installer. Other icons on the desktop are available for launching a welcome screen and accessing the OpenMandriva website.



The welcome screen opens automatically shortly after the desktop loads. The welcome screen provides us with a basic overview of the OpenMandriva project. The welcome window is divided into six tabs and I will come back to the information and features available through the welcome window shortly.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- The Plasma application menu

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The OpenMandriva system installer is a graphical application which begins by getting us to select our preferred language from a list. On this first page of the installer we can choose to open the project's release notes in a web browser. The following screens ask us to select our time zone from a map of the world and confirm our keyboard layout again. Next, we reach the disk partitioning section of the installer. The Calamares installer gives us the chance to either wipe our hard disk and install OpenMandriva or manually divide up the disk. The manual disk partitioning screen is fairly easy to use while providing a lot of options. The installer supports working with MBR and GPT disk layouts and we can format partitions with ext2/3/4, JFS, XFS, HFS, Btrfs, f2fs and Reiser file systems. The system installer also supports working with LVM volumes. The next screen gets us to create a user account for ourselves. The user account can be made to login without a password and we have the option of giving the user account system administrator powers. Next, Calamares shows us a summary of the actions it will take and waits for our confirmation before it proceeds with formatting our disk and copying files to our hard drive. When the installer is finished it gives us the choice of rebooting the computer or returning to the live desktop environment.



Booting our new, local copy of OpenMandriva brings us to a graphical login screen. From the login screen we can sign into our user account using one of several session types. Apart from the default Plasma desktop environment, we are given the chance to login to Plasma running on a Wayland session, the LXQt desktop or the Openbox window manager. The Plasma on Wayland session failed when I tried it, immediately crashing and returning me to the login screen. The LXQt session would load and work, but it had some obvious issues. For example, icons tended to be invisible. I also found when running LXQt, the application menu button appeared at the bottom of the screen, but clicking it opened the application menu at the top of the display. This resulted in a lot of extra mouse movement when trying to launch applications and it looked uncoordinated. The Plasma on X session worked, but offered several surprises of its own which I will come back to later.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- The Configuration tab of the welcome window

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Upon signing in the welcome screen appears. The welcome screen features six tabs. Two tabs, labelled Welcome and About, provide a brief overview of what OpenMandriva is. A third tab, called Features, shows us a list of key features and package versions. For example, the Features tab lets us know OpenMandriva supports booting on EFI-enabled computers. Another tab, called Configure, provides us with quick access to configuration modules. These modules help us set up networking, connect to printers, download software updates and select a desktop theme. The Applications tab gives us a quick way to download popular open source applications. This tab is further divided into software categories and we can click on any of the listed packages to install the software, assuming our account has admin access. The final tab is called Contribute and it gives us access to on-line resources such as OpenMandriva's documentation, mailing list and bug database. I quite like the welcome screen as it gives us quick access to a lot of tools and software as soon as we login. This lets us dive right into setting up the distribution without hunting through the application menu for configuration tools.



Looking around the desktop, I noticed a green icon in the system tray. Clicking on this icon brings up a notification box which lets us know if there are software updates available in OpenMandriva's software repositories. The first day I was running OpenMandriva there were 30 updates waiting. Clicking on Update button in the notification launches the Discover package manager. At this point, Discover seemed to hang. The application sat on the Updates page, endlessly trying to load a list of available updates. After several minutes of no disk or network activity and I closed the window. I then tried launching Discover again and, once more, the package manager was unable to provide a list of updates. At this point, I went into OpenMandriva's Control Centre and opened the update manager module which was able to list the available updates. The update module was also able to download and install the new packages with no problems.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- The KDE System Settings panel

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On the subject of control panels, OpenMandriva ships with two. The first is KDE's System Settings panel where we can manipulate the look and behaviour of our desktop environment. The System Settings panel helps us manage themes, adjust window behaviour, change alerts and enable/disable visual effects. The modules in the System Settings panel generally worked well for me, with one exception. I was unable to get the module which manages printers to allow me to add a new printer to the system. The printer module kept prompting me for my password and rejecting my credentials.



The second settings panel, Control Centre, deals with lower level aspects of the operating system. The Centre is divided into categories which help us quickly find modules which will help us work with software packages, hardware, security and networking. There are configuration modules for adding or removing software from the system, downloading updates and managing repositories. There are tools to help us set up printers and scanners. I found the Control Centre's printer manager worked well and I did not run into the credentials issue I had when using the System Settings panel. Other modules provide us with hardware information, create and monitor network connections and work with user accounts. There are also modules for managing background services and setting up network shares. Oddly enough, I found the Samba shares created in the Control Centre were not visible to the local Dolphin file manager, though I was able to confirm the shares were active from another system. There is a firewall module which supports multiple zones, handy for people running OpenMandriva on portable computers. There is a module included called Snapshot which I suspect is there to work with file system snapshots or backups. The Snapshot module always crashed immediately when I tried to launch it. Other modules tended to work well. OpenMandriva's Control Centre is easy to navigate and the individual modules tend to be simple and straight forward to use. I think these settings modules will appeal to newcomers as well as more experienced users.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- Configuring the operating system from the Control Centre

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One of the quirks I ran into while using the Control Centre was the module for adding and removing software showed both 32-bit and 64-bit packages in its search results and package lists, greatly padding the number of packages displayed to the user. I also ran into packages which, when downloaded, failed to pass their signature verification step. The software manager offered to continue the installation (which is not recommended) or abort. Aborting caused all queued packages to be discarded along with the corrupted package.



OpenMandriva ships with a large collection of applications. Digging through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser (without Flash support), the Qupzilla browser, the Blogilo blogging client and a desktop sharing application. The KTorrent bittorrent software is included along with the KGet download manager and the Akregator feed reader. The Kopete messaging software is included along with the KMail e-mail client and the Konversation IRC application. Network Manager is available to help us connect to a variety of network types. LibreOffice is included, as are the Okular document viewer, the KOrganizer personal organizer and the skrooge money manager. The Krita painting application is included too, with the digiKam digital camera manager and the Kamoso web cam manager. OpenMandriva ships with a full range of media codecs along with the Clementine audio player, the SMPlayer media player, the VLC multimedia player and the mpv media player. The distribution also ships with the Kwave audio editor and the Kdelive video editor. The distribution features a number of other utilities, including the Ark archive manager, the Kleopatra key manager and KDE Connect which helps us share information between the distribution and a mobile Android device. OpenMandriva ships with two virtual terminals (QTerminal and Konsole) as well as two file managers (Dolphin and PCManFM). In the background we find systemd version 231 and version 4.6.5 of the Linux kernel.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- Running Firefox and LibreOffice

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There seems to be a lot of duplication in the distribution's selection of software. I sometimes got the impression OpenMandriva was intended to be set up with two main desktop sessions (Plasma and LXQt) with the idea one set of applications would be used under LXQt and a different set would be used when running Plasma. This would make sense, except that there is not much benefit to seeing all the applications for both desktops in the same application menu as things quickly get crowded.



I ran into a few unusual issues when running the distribution. One was the way the desktop theme and icons kept changing from one login session to the next. Sometimes when I logged in icons would be quite large and widgets would be more widely spaced. This made Plasma look like it was set up to be used on a touch device. Other times, when I logged into the same Plasma session, the icons would be a lot smaller and the theme appeared to be set up for a more traditional desktop experience. There did not appear to be any set pattern to which theme I would get when I logged in, the widget and icon size seemed to change at random.





OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 -- The large icon view

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Another problem I ran into was the operating system was slow to perform tasks and the desktop was unusually sluggish to respond. Booting to a login screen took over a minute, more than twice the time Linux usually takes to boot on this hardware. To login to Plasma took an additional two minutes or more, when usually booting and signing into a desktop session on the test computer takes under a minute. Applications tended to take about three to five times longer to load on OpenMandriva compared to other distributions I have used recently. Once programs were running, they were slow to respond to input and I sometimes found myself pausing while typing so the text editor or word processor could catch up.



To make matters worse, there did not appear to be any obvious cause for the reduced performance. OpenMandriva performed slowly both on my physical desktop computer and in a VirtualBox virtual machine. I tried disabling file indexing, turned off desktop visual effects and changed the theme. Looking at the top process monitor, there were not any processes using a lot of CPU cycles. The PulseAudio service did constantly use about 5% of my CPU and, while launching new applications, Plasma Shell would spike for several seconds, but no processes consistently used a lot of CPU or blocked other processes. In both test environments, OpenMandriva used about 650MB of memory. This is more than average, but not a significant amount of RAM for the test environments.



Conclusions



While the latest version of OpenMandriva does not introduce many new features, there are definitely some changes at work in this release, most of them not for the better. In this release Plasma operated at a pace I usually only observe when running a 3-D desktop (such as GNOME Shell or Unity) in a virtual machine without 3-D acceleration. The system seemed to struggle to even boot, grinding the hard drive for several minutes and amassing large load averages. There were some strange display bugs, like the LXQt menu opening at the top of the screen instead of at the bottom where the menu button was. The changing theme was also jarring.



On top of this, the update widget did not work, necessitating a trip to the Control Panel to acquire security updates. Most configuration modules worked, and configuration has always been a strong point in the Mandriva family. However, the System Settings printer module did not work for me and I could not get the Snapshot module to run.



I would rather distributions not display both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of packages in their graphical software managers. Both OpenMandriva and Korora have done this lately and it just pads the list of packages and is likely to confuse users. The package manager should know which architecture we are using and filter available software accordingly. I was further concerned to run into situations where package signatures could not be verified. Maybe it was a case of a corrupted download, but it could be something more serious and the package manager does not handle the situation gracefully. We can install the bad package or abort, dropping all queued actions. I think a Retry option to download the package from another mirror would be a nicer solution.



Usually I enjoy using OpenMandriva as it tends to have a newcomer friendly approach and a great Control Centre. This time around though the distribution performed too slowly to be practical for me to use and introduced too many bugs for me to consider version 3.0 beginner friendly. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card