OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC available for testing

We have good news: Cooker, our development branch, is working very well right now.
Our internal testers have been reporting that the system looks very responsive and already brings many user visible advantages over OMLx 4.2.

Hence we decided to publish a unscheduled stable release to permit the Rock users to enjoy of a good amount of updates they would otherwise not get (unless they upgrade to Rolling) before moving ahead with the more ambitious plans for OMLx 5.0.
Here is the Release Candidate.

Major updates:

Linux kernel 5.12.4
LLVM 12 - We have updated our main toolchain to LLVM 12, and rebuilt the entire system with the new compiler; it should improve the overall performance a little
systemd-248.20210517, which should fix hostname resolution problems some people have observed in 4.2
KDE Plasma desktop 5.21.5
KDE Frameworks 5.82.0
KDE Gear 21.04.1
Qt 5.15.3 with all patches proposed by KDE
Mesa 21.1.1
FFMPEG to 4.4

Another feature that will be interesting to some is that we’ve fully integrated support for the new JPEG-XL picture file format. JPEG-XL is significantly more efficient than traditional JPEG, and also adds all major features of PNG (such as transparent images and support for lossless compression).
Upgraded also some cool stuff not on the ISO but available in our repositories:

AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 - official AMD Vulkan driver. It is an alternative driver and can be installed at same time with RADV. It can be used to improve performance or stability in some games on Linux
OBS-Studio 27.0.0 rc1 - application for recording and streaming; it finally supports wayland session. It also supports recording h264 with VAAPI (hardware accelerated video encoding) and we also patched it to support HEVC-x265 with HW VAAPI
Blender 2.92.0
GIMP 2.10.24
Audacity 3.0.2
Firefox 88.0
Steam 1.0.0.70
LXQt 0.17

The port to PinePhone is also starting to become useful: phone calls are working, and we have rewritten the camera app to be far more useful.

Please note development releases ’Update channel’ is set to Rolling by default.
The recommended command to upgrade Rolling system is:

$ sudo dnf clean all ; sudo dnf --allowerasing distro-sync

You can read more about OpenMandriva Release Plan and Repositories, please visit: https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/doc/release-plan-and-repositories

Read Release notes and Errata

We exhort all OpenMandriva users to test our system and report any issue you may find at our forum or at our Issues Tracker system.

Looking forward to see also YouTubers and video reviews makers’ comments and feedbacks. Thank you very much to those who help us to improve OpenMandriva Lx distribution.

You can get in touch real time with our developers at IRC channel #openmandriva-cooker on freenode and #openmandriva-cooker:matrix.org in matrix.

Download OpenMandriva Lx 4.3

— At SourceForge

Our sources can be found on Github
Our main org: OpenMandrivaSoftware
Our packaging org: OpenMandrivaAssociation

If you want to help the project and support OpenMandriva, please consider joining our team or making a donation.