My name is David Locklear, and I have been posting things on Fedora listserve for several months. I am a novice Rawhide user, and use Rawhide as my daily driver. I recently installed 33 on my secondary NVMe. I am in Rawhide right now typing this. However the purpose of this post is to share my experience this week with OpenMandriva. I first installed their new iso of the Alpha version on an SSD. After a few hours, I decided to install their developmental version called Cooker on a separate SSD. And finally, I overwrote that with a version the offer that is build by clang and uses a znver1 kernel, which allegedly will someday offer performance improvements on Ryzen. Below is a screenshot of my set-up using that: Dropbox - Davids_OpenMandriva_install.png - Simplify your life
The first problem I encountered was the installs defaulted to their only USA mirror. And they apparently do not have any USA users, as they had no idea the mirror was down. They only have one other mirror apparently in France. Next problem is they have one guy doing a mass-rebuild at the moment, and their only server was down. And finally they are having a hell of a time switching from python 3.8. to 3.9, and so lots of applications crash. But all in all it is usable. I met some helpful people on the chat forum which uses a service called Element ( used to be called Riot ?? ).
The main difference between Cooker at OpenMandriva and Fedora Rawhide ( from my perspective ), is their Cooker comes ready out of the box for a user to do desktop work, with lots of applications ( probably too many ), and codecs, and drivers. It is also focused on KDE Plasma. Their leader, Bero, seems to be really enthusiastic about OpenMandriva. I do not know any other distros easily offering a clang-built iso nor one with a zen-optimised kernel. Also, they only have about 10 people working on it apparently, and all are volunteers. So one should not be surprised that their Cooker branch has far less activity than Rawhide. One thing I do like about Cooker is only one repo.
In an effort to expand my experience with Linux and Fedora, and the world in general, I decided tonight to install the developmental version of GhostBSD on a blank SSD, and compare my experience with my previous experience with my first initial impression of other operating systems. At first the installer would not work, but I chose VESA graphics, and it worked. Then once I was in GhostBSD, I decided to run an update and it would not reboot. So I rebooted again, and fortunately it worked. My graphics are a mess but everything is functional. GhostBSD uses the 12.2 version of FreeBSD and the 1.24.1 version of MATE. It uses the fish shell, and the ZFS way of storage. Other than that, I have no clue. I did live in TrueOS once about 2 years ago ( which was in development then as FreeBSD 11, I think ). Everything seems to work. My graphics look awful. I will keep it for a while until I need to load another operating system on this SSD or if it borks. Supposed to be stable, according to the FreeBSD folks.
