OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 "Mercury" Released, This Is What's New

The OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 operating system has been officially released as the latest and greatest version of this RPM-based GNU/Linux distribution that keeps the Mandriva and Mandrake spirit alive.

Coming eight months after the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 release, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is dubbed “Mercury” and features many of the newest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software. Among these, we can mention the recently released Linux 5.5. kernel, KDE Plasma 5.17.5 desktop environment, and LibreOffice 6.4 office suite.

Probably the coolest thing about OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is the fact that it ships pre-loaded with a new, in-house built utility called Desktop Presets (om-feeling-like), which lets users customize the appearance of the KDE Plasma desktop environment to look and feel similar to other popular operating systems.

For example, you can make your brand-new OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 installation look like Windows 10 or macOS. Additionally, it’s also possible to make OpenMandriva Lx look and feel like Windows 7, so it very useful for those who want to migrate from Windows to Linux.

Another new tool included in this release is Update Configuration (om-update-config), which helps you keep your OpenMandriva Lx installation up-to-date at all times by allowing you to set automatic updates that can be installed either manually or automatically. The tool also lets you disable automatic updates.

Furthermore, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is the first release to feature the Zstandard (zstd) compression for packages instead of xz, and a special version specifically optimized for current AMD Ryzen, ThreadRipper, and EPYC family of processors.

Among the major software releases included in OpenMandriva Lx 4.1, we can mention the Qt Framework 5.14.1 open-source application framework, KDE Frameworks 5.66.0 and KDE Applications 19.12.1 open-source software suites, LLVM/clang 9.0.1 compiler, Falkon 3.1.0 web browser, and Krita 4.2.8 digital painting software.

Also included are the Calamares 3.2.17 installer, Kdenlive 19.12.1 video editor, SMPlayer 19.10.2 media player, digiKam 7.0.0 image editor and organizer, SimpleScreenRecorder 0.3.11 screen recorder, Java 13, and NX Firewall.

Of course, users will also find numerous other popular apps in the software repositories, such as the Mozilla Firefox 72.0.2 and Chromium 79.0.3945.130 web browsers, Mozilla Thunderbird 68.4.1 email and news client, Virtualbox 6.1.2 virtualization software, or GIMP 2.10.14 image editor.

A Clang compiled kernel is available as well, named kernel-release-clang, which users can install alongside the normal kernel for comparison, and there’s also an alternative package manager called Zypper, and several alternative desktop environments.