14 DAY TRIAL // The OpenMandriva community announced the general availability of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 operating system, a major release that brings numerous new features, updated components, and lots of improvements.
After almost two years in development, the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 operating system is finally here and comes with numerous goodies for fans of the popular Linux bistro that continues the sprit of the now deprecated Mandriva and Mandrake Linux operating systems.
Compiled with LLVM/Clang instead of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 aims to be a cutting-edge Linux-based operating system that offers some of the highest levels of optimization by enabling LTO in certain packages to make it fast, stable, and reliable at all times.
This release brings dozens of updated components and new features, but most importantly better hardware support by shipping with the latest Linux 5.1 kernel series and the Mesa 19.1 graphics stack. OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 also comes with complete support for AArch64 and ARMv7hnl platforms, along with a variant built specifically for AMD processors.
"A RISC-V port is also in progress, but not yet ready for release," said OpenMandriva. "We have also built a version specifically for current AMD processors (Ryzen, ThreadRipper, EPYC) that outperforms the generic version by taking advantage of new features in those processors."
Here's what's new in OpenMandriva Lx 4.0
Highlights of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 release include two new in-house built utilities, namely OpenMandriva Repository Management Tool and OpenMandriva Control Center, and several new apps like the Dnfdragora DNF GUI as a replacement for rpmdrake, Kuser as a replacement for userdrake to manage users and groups, as well as KBackup as a replacement for draksnapshot to backup your system.
Among the updated components, we can mention the KDE Plasma 5.15.5 desktop environment, accompanied by the KDE Applications 19.04.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.58.0 software suites built against the Qt 5.12.3 LTS application framework, as well as X.Org Server 1.20.4, LLVM/clang 8.0.1, Calamares 3.2.7, systemd 242, Java 12, LibreOffice 6.2, Mozilla Firefox 66.0.5, Krita 4.2.1, and digiKam 6.0.
With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 release, OpenMandriva has also rethought the operating system's release model, adding a new option for users, which is yet to be announced in the coming weeks. Until then, you can download OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 right now from our free software portal. If you're already using OpenMandriva Linux, it is recommended to backup your data and reinstall to avoid any configuration conflicts.
