OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Alpha is ready for testing

The first OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 release cycle milestone is available to download for testing. The availability of the first alpha release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 was announced by Cristina Sgubbi.

OpenMandriva distribution is a full-featured Linux desktop and server, to facilitate the creation, improvement, promotion, and distribution of free and open-source software in general, and OpenMandriva projects in particular. It is based on ROSA, a Russian Linux distribution project which forked Mandriva Linux in 2012, The most interesting feature of this release is an experimental Linux kernel built with the Clang compiler.

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What’s new?

According to the release notes, the big changes came with this release can be listed as thus: The toolchain has been updated, everything has been built with Glibc 2.30 and Clang 9.0, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 5.3.9, Qt has been updated to version 5.14.0-beta2; Plasma has been updated as well – bumping KDE Plasma Framework to version 5.64 and Plasma Desktop to 5.17.2 and KDE Applications to 19.08.3. Testing on more alternative desktops is available.

The new version also provides an OpenMandriva Clang-compiled kernel, named kernel-release-clang. It is possible to install the same version of kernel-release and kernel-release-clang and compare them with each other. The Clang version uses the same source code as the regular kernel package but has been built using the Clang toolchain instead of GCC. Clang is the default compiler in OpenMandriva, but the kernel has been made compatible with it only recently – making it an experimental build for now.