Review: OpenMandriva Lx 5.0
OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, in both the Plasma and LXQt editions, installs in about a minute and half.
Unfortunately, that's the highlight of running two of the distro's desktops for about a week. The LXQt edition, thanks to a D-bus error, was mostly unusable, and the Plasma variant, though as slick and as cool as Plasma is supposed to be, had its own share of irritating -- and sometimes more than irritating -- bugs that also make it a poor choice for a daily driver.
Perhaps the most disappointing part about my week with the new release of OpenMandriva 5.0 (which is the latest release of the stable "Rock" branch and carries the code name "Iodine"), was I really wanted to like the LXQt version; I prefer lighter, less complicated desktops, and have never seen the need for features like KWallet and all those windows that pop-up. But I had to switch to the Plasma 5 version for this review when my attempts to run LXQt failed over and over.
The other irony here? That OpenMandriva is one of the oldest and most venerable Linux distributions. Its roots date to 1998 and Mandrake Linux, which was perhaps the most user-friendly distro of that era. That OpenMandriva has released a desktop that doesn't work and another that doesn't work well enough is especially disappointing, given its history.