14 DAY TRIAL // OpenMandriva Lx, a Linux distribution developed by the OpenMandriva Association, has just received an early development version that has been deemed as pre-Alpha.
The OpenMandriva devs have really picked up the pace and they released a new version of their beautiful OpenMandriva Lx distro, even if it's just early work and it's not probably what you will want to install as a daily driver. On the other hand, it is nice to see the OS evolving, especially since it provides a very different experience than what we're used to.
We don't get to experience too many distros that really show off what they can do with the right amount of effort. Most teams are content to provide a simple and perhaps vanilla experience, but the OpenMandriva Lx team showed us what you can do with KDE and why this particular desktop environment is actually very much underused.
OpenMandriva Lx 2015 shows great promise
It's interesting to see that OpenMandriva Lx has opted to keep the KDE 4.14.x branch, which means that they are not ready to jump ship to the next iteration, although they are working on it. For now, it's still unclear whether they will be able to do this before the current development branch is completed.
"We’ve upgraded Xorg to version 1.16.3, and Mesa to 10.4.2, which brings the latest free drivers for the best performance. We recommend that users change the composite manager in KDE from XRender to OpenGL mode. This gives transparency the proper blur effect. This also allows our theme and it’s decorations to be shown at their best," is noted in the official announcement.
The developers also explain that SDDM is now the default display manager, LibreOffice 4.3.5 has been added by default, Firefox 35 has been implemented, and numerous other packages have been added.
You can check out our initial report on the launch of OpenMandriva Lx 2015 for more details. You can download OpenMandriva Lx 2015 Pre-Alpha right now from Softpedia.
