The OpenMandriva project announced the general availability of OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, a major release for this completely community-driven GNU/Linux distribution, and also, a direct successor of Mandriva Linux.
Equipped with the most recent Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 is presented as the final OpenMandriva Lx release loaded with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment. The latest KDE Plasma 5.27.9 LTS desktop is pre-installed, along with the KDE Gear 23.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.112 software packages.
In this release, it is important to mention that the X11 session is still the default on both bare metal and virtual machines. OpenMandriva has not yet declared any plans to shift to Wayland as default.
Yet, given that the forthcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment will default to Wayland, it’s plausible that they’ll also adopt it in their next major release, specifically OpenMandriva Lx 6.0. Nonetheless, for those interested in using Wayland, a Wayland session is accessible in OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 (can be selected from the login manager).
This release also merges the / and /usr filesystems, addresses recent security vulnerabilities, updates many of the core components and pre-installed applications to their latest versions, and offers new variants of the GNU/Linux distribution for various ARM boards, which will be available from the official website in the coming weeks.
“We’re still working on the best way to bring features like a fully open graphics stack even on the Mali G610 GPU, for example, those found in Rockchip 3588 boards,” said OpenMandriva. “A RISC-V port is also in progress, but will likely not be ready for a fixed point release before 6.0.”
OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 is available for download right now from the official website. Two variants are available, a complete ISO with all the KDE software you may need and a Slim variant that comes only with essential software and lets you choose the programs you want to use in the distribution.
In addition, OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 can be downloaded as ISO images pre-installed with the GNOME and LXQt desktop environments. All users of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.x series are strongly recommended to do a fresh installation of OpenMandriva Lx 5.0.
Last updated 9 hours ago