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OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC (Release Candidate) is now available for public testing to give you an early taste of the new features and changes to be implemented in the upcoming release.
In early April, the OpenMandriva team announced their plans to release one more point release for the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series before they move to the OpenMandriva Lx 5 branch, which is currently in heavy development.
As such, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 “Nickel” is now taking shape as the third installment in the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series, shipping with the latest Linux 5.12 kernel and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, which is accompanied by the recently released KDE Gear 21.04.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.82 software suites, all compiled against the Qt 5.15.3 application framework with all patches proposed by the KDE Project.
For AMD users, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 promises to ship with the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1, as an alternative to the open source Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) for better gaming performance. On top of that, there’s also the latest Mesa 21.1.1 graphics stacks.
Under the hood, there’s an updated toolchain powered by LLVM/Clang 12 system compiler to improve the overall performance of the system, along with the systemd 248 init system, FFmpeg 4.4 multimedia framework, as well as 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),” said the devs.
Among some of the updated apps included so far, there’s the Mozilla Firefox 88 web browser, GIMP 2.10.24 image editor, Blender 2.92 3D modeling software, Audacity 3.0.2 audio editor, OBS-Studio 27.0.0 recording and streaming app with Wayland support, and Valve’s Steam 1.0.0.70 gaming platform.
If you want to test the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 release, you can download the RC (Release Candidate) release right now from the release announcement page, where you’ll also find information about how to report bugs to help the OpenMandriva team make the final release as stable and reliable as possible.
Last updated 3 years ago
