OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 Enters Development with Linux 5.7, KDE Plasma 5.19.3, and LibreOffice 7.0

OpenMandriva Lx 4.2

The OpenMandriva community announced today the availability for public testing of the first alpha build of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 distribution release.

Dubbed “Argon,” OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is the second major update to the latest OpenMandriva Lx 4 series. It comes with up to date packages and GNU/Linux technologies, including the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series and KDE Plasma 5.19 desktop environment.

In this first alpha version, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 ships with Linux kernel 5.7.8, which should further improve hardware support, as well as the newest KDE/Qt software, such as the KDE Plasma 5.19.3 desktop environment, KDE Applications 20.04.3, KDE Frameworks 5.72.0, and Qt 5.15, for a better desktop experience.

Under the hood, there’s an updated graphics stack based on X.Org Server 1.20.8, Mesa 20.1 and Wayland 1.20.8. The toolchain has been updated as well and it now includes LLVM/clang 10.0.1, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 10.1, GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.31, Java 14, and systemd 245.

The Zstandard (Zstd) real-time compression algorithm is being used in this release to provide the best compression ratios for the kernel, which translates to faster boot times. Calamares 3.2.26 is used as the default graphical installer in this alpha version.

Software-wise, this alpha release gives you early access to cutting-edge and upcoming apps, including the LibreOffice 7.0 office suite, digiKam 7.0 professional photo management software, and Calligra 3.2 office suite.

Also included in this first alpha release are the Mozilla Firefox 78, Chromium 83 and Falkon 3.1 web browsers, Krita 4.2.9 digital painting software, SimpleScreenRecorder 0.4.2 screen recording tool, as well as the VLC 3.0.11 and SMPlayer 20.6.0 media players.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is available for public testing right now as an alpha version, which is a very early development build that’s NOT recommended for installation on production machines. If you find any issues or bug, please report them here.

Two ISO images are available for download, for generic x86_64 systems and for computers with recent AMD CPUs from the Ryzen, ThreadRipper, and EPYC family. When testing, please also note that this release requires at least 2GB of RAM and 10 GB of free disk space, including for virtual machines, and doesn’t support Secure Boot.

Last updated 4 years ago

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