OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha: Adds UEFI Support, Defaults To LXQt

It's been a while since last hearing anything out of the OpenMandriva camp, but today they've put out the first alpha release for their "Lx 3" release that's codenamed "Einsteinium." There's quite some interesting changes with this forthcoming update.

The OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha is a big update over their earlier 2014.1 release. This yearly update to OpenMandriva adds initial UEFI support, switches over to the Calamares installer, defaults to the LXQt desktop environment, uses SDDM as the log-in/display manager, defaults to SMPlayer for media playback, and has a whole lot of package updates.

Under the hood, OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha is powered by the Linux 3.18.11 kernel, systemd 219, Mesa 10.5.3, and they've switched over to Python 3 as their default Python.

Interestingly, OpenMandriva Lx 3 is defaulting to the LLVM Clang compiler rather than GCC as the default compiler. While Clang tends to be available on most Linux distributions, OpenMandriva Lx 3 is going to be the first major distribution using it as the default C/C++ compiler -- aside from the many BSD-based distributions out there already defaulting to Clang.

Learn more about the OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha release at the OpenMandriva.org blog.