OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 released

We are pleased to announce the latest release of the OpenMandriva Distribution, OMLx 4.3

OpenMandriva Lx is a unique and independent linux distribution, a direct descendant of Mandriva Linux and the first Linux distribution utilise the LLVM compiler. This release keeps using the entire LLVM toolchain which completes the work that began in 2015.
We hope that you find that this link time optimised desktop and its supporting applications to be bright and responsive in use. You can find out more about link time optimisation here: https://llvm.org/docs/LinkTimeOptimization.html

The OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 operating system distribution is FREE and provides the user with all the software funtionality that is available on a proprietary system and then some. All this is supported by the world class KDE Plasma Desktop, a desktop user interface that provides comprehensive access to all the installed software toools. The Plasma desktop offers advanced feature such as multiple task based desktops, and a collection of desktop widgets that support a wide range of information gathering and display.

We provide an OpenMandriva utility Desktop Presets (om-feeling-like) which offers a quick way to customize the appearance of your OpenMandriva Plasma desktop to look and feel similar to other systems you may be used to. We hope that this will help those who are new to OpenMandriva to feel at home with our desktop.

We also provide an improved ’OM-Welcome’ utility which guides you through initial setup and suggests some useful additional applications that you may wish to install other than those distributed of the iso.

A third utility Software Repository Selector (om-repo-picker), to enable additional repositories with thousands of additional Free Software packages, updated and greatly improved.

Ports: A full 64-bit ARM port is now available for this release making it possible to build energy efficient PC replacements for less that $150, as well as providing more energy efficient servers in the data center.
Installable images for the PinebookPro, Raspberry Pi 4B and 3B+, Rock Pi 4A, 4B and 4C, Synquacer, Cubox Pulse and generic UEFI compatible devices, such as most aarch64 server boards, are currently being tested and will be released shortly. This port allows us to now target smartphones and an image is now acailable targets the PinePhone (but should not yet be considered final quality).

This release comes with the very latest KDE applications (see below for technical details).

Included in this release are:
LibreOffice suite 7.3.0.3, Krita 5.0.2, Digikam 7.5, SMPlayer 21.10.0, VLC 3.0.16, Falkon browser 3.2, SimpleScreenRecorder 0.4.3;

PipeWire has become our default sound server in the current system release, thus replacing PulseAudio. However, PulseAudio is still in our repository and you can return to it at any time.

A port to RISC-V - an Open Source processor architecture - is in the works, but not yet included in the 4.3 release.

For more technically adept, you may find interesting that this version also includes:
kernel 5.16.7, KDE Frameworks 5.90, Plasma Desktop 5.23.5, Applications 21.12.2, Qt 5.15.3, LLVM/Clang 13.0.0, systemd 249, Java 17 (and 18 beta, 19 dev), Calamares 3.2.39, binutils 2.37, GCC 11.2.

Also available in the repositories:
Alternative desktop environments like LXQt 1.0, Xfce 4.16, Gnome 41, MATE 1.26, Lumina 1.6.2, IceWM 2.9.5 or i3-wm 4.20. We have also added two new and interesting Qt-based shells like CuteFish 0.7 and Maui-shell.
In addition, the repository includes packages like Firefox 96.0.3, Thunderbird 91.5.1 Chromium browser stable 97 (and beta 98, dev 99), Virtualbox 6.1.32, OBS Studio 27.1.3, GIMP 2.10.30, Calligra Suite 3.2.1, FFMPEG 5.0;
Zypper as alternative package manager, PHP 8.1.2, numerous games, tools, development tools, educational software and more.

Last but not least, OpenMandriva provides a clang compiled kernel. Users can install same version of kernel-release-desktop and kernel-release-desktop-clang for comparison. In OM Welcome you will also find a convenient shortcut for it to install.

Despite many tribulations on the way we reached the MOGA milestone of OMLx 4.3.
(MOGA: Making OpenMandriva Great Again!)
Most bugs reported for the test releases have been fixed.
We warmly thank our developers, testers and bug reporters, all our support teams as well as all people at large who are working so hard to make this technically advanced and beautifully artworked distribution.
We would also like to thank Ampere Computing for providing us with fast aarch64 build machines and HostTech Switzerland for providing us with connectivity, speeding up our efforts at porting to this architecture.

As with any new stable release, we strongly recommend to backup your data and to perform a fresh install of the new operating system, to avoid any conflict with existing configuration settings.

Please note:
For stable release, ’Update channel’ is set to Rock by default.
OpenMandriva Lx has a Rolling branch available, while also keeping Rock.
Users can switch from Rock to Rolling by mean of Software Repository Selector application.

Watch out for big news about the Rolling branch soon!

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

We use Mirrorbits as default mirror redirector. You can see:
— Mirror statistics
— Closest mirrors to your location
You can also have a view of our mirror status at our MirMon instance.

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

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

Please read more about the new features at What’s New in OpenMandriva Lx 4.3.

As always, please read the Release Notes and the Errata.

Detailed information about this release can be found in OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 Release Notes

Download OpenMandriva Lx 4.3

Available versions are
. OpenMandrivaLx.4.3-plasma.x86_64.iso
. OpenMandrivaLx.4.3-plasma.znver1.iso
. aarch64 images will be added shortly.

— At SourceForge

— Torrents (via archive.org)

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

Upgrading from OpenMandriva Lx 4.2

Upgrading an existing Rock/OM Lx 4.2 system is detailed here: Upgrading OMLx 4.2 system to OMLx 4.3

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