Review: OpenMandriva ROME
The main characteristic of OpenMandriva, which kept coming up time and again, was that the distribution was unreliable - particularly early on. Sometimes the distribution failed to boot. Sometimes it failed to login. The Calamares installer failed on its first time through, but not future times with the same settings. Discover and DNF report the status of updates differently. The desktop crashed frequently, especially with compositing enabled. With the default settings, and whenever I used the Wayland session, the system would lock up if I tried to logout. Once I stood up to get a glass of water and left my computer unattended for two minutes and, when I returned, there were multiple error reports waiting, indicating Plasma had crashed twice while I was away. I'm not sure I've ever come across a desktop distribution which was so error prone and unreliable. To make matters worse, almost any time I launched a software management tool, such as DnfDrake, I'd be prompted for my admin password twice. Apparently once for the graphical tool and once for the underlying DNF utility.
Once I had disabled compositing and installed updates the experience got measurably better, but it still wasn't great. The desktop crashed less often and I was able to shutdown the system, but it still wasn't stable.