14 DAY TRIAL // The final version of OpenMandriva Lx 2014, a fully-featured Linux desktop and server sponsored by the OpenMandriva Association, has been officially released.
Some of you might remember that there was a time when an operating system called Mandriva was the king, but OpenMandriva is a different beast altogether. The new operating system might share some of the values of the old OS, but it's pretty different and, most importantly, still under development.
“The introduction of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 represents a major update from the previous version of OpenMandriva Lx, and is also the second release under the community of the OpenMandriva Association,” reads the official announcement.
The developers of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 have implemented 3.13.11 nrjQL, which is actually their own variant of the stock kernel with the same version. This has been done to improve the desktop system performance and responsiveness.
“To achieve this the CPU and RCU have been configured with full preemption and boost mode, and the CK1 and BFQ patchsets have been added to provide further optimisations including better CPU load and disk I/O schedulers, an improved memory manager using UKSM, and TuxOnIce providing suspension and hibernation services,” is also stated in the announcement.
The default desktop environment for OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 is KDE 4.12.4, but the developers have implemented a different launcher from what is offered by default. The new launcher is called Homerun and its content is organized in tabs, which makes it rather different from what we were used to seeing in KDE systems.
Also, Xorg has been updated to version 1.15.1, Mesa has been updated to version 10.1.1, LibreOffice 4.2.3 has been implemented by default, the latest Firefox 29 with the Australis theme has been added, Java 7 is now used by default, the support for printing has been improved, and a Welcome to OpenMandriva Lx introduction is now provided at first boot.
This is also the first version of OpenMandriva LX that is capable of EFI booting, which means that users will be able to install it on a system that has UEFI (some problems might still linger).
The declared goal of OpenMandriva is to facilitate the creation, improvement, promotion, and distribution of free software and open source in general, and the OpenMandriva Lx is the perfect tool to do just that.
A complete list of changes and new features can be found in the official announcement. You can download OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 right now from Softpedia.