14 DAY TRIAL // OpenMandriva Association announced the release of the first pre-release version of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 operating system, the first major update to the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now officially in development, and a firs alpha release is ready for public testing with the latest KDE Plasma 5.17.2 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the KDE Applications 19.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.64.0 software suites, all built agains Qt 5.14. It also ships with the Linux 5.3.9 kernel and an updated toolchain built with Clang 9.0 and Glibc 2.30.
As OpenMandriva Lx is one of the first and few GNU/Linux distributions to use Clang as the default compiler instead of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), the development team decided that's it time to ship a Linux kernel that's also compatible with the Clang compiler. However, it's not enabled by default for now and remains an experimental feature.
"We also provide an OpenMandriva Clang-compiled kernel, named kernel-release-clang. User can install the same version of kernel-release and kernel-release-clang for comparison. It is built from the same sources as the regular kernel package, but has been built using the Clang toolchain instead of GCC," said OpenMandriva.
Support for alternative desktops, bug fixes
Also new in the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 release is support for installing more alternative desktop environments to KDE Plasma, which is used by default. This release of OpenMandriva Lx also supports booting from and installing to systems with and without UEFI, but it doesn't support partitioning LVM and RAID setups with the Calamares installer.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 contains numerous bug fixes as well, especially notable here a fix for a major issue in the ARM port, which caused several package builds to fail to compile. You can download OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Alpha right now through our free software portal if you want to take it for a test drive, but please keep in mind that this early development build is not ready for any production work.