OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Beta Brings Installer Improvements, Dnfdragora GUI Package Manager

The long-awaited OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 distribution update entered alpha for Christmas and this weekend was finally succeeded by the Lx 4.0 Beta 1 milestone.

The OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 cycle prior to reaching alpha transitioned from RPM5 to RPM4, now employs DNF as the software package manager, makes use of LLVM Clang 7.0 as the default system compiler, began shipping AMD znver1 "Zen" optimized binaries, introduced AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) support, and offered a wealth of updated system packages.

With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Beta 1 release, there are various Calamares installer improvements, the Linux 4.20 kernel is now used while the desktop is powered by the KDE Plasma 5.15 snapshot and KDE Frameworks 5.54 with Qt 5.12, LibreOffice 6.2, and a number of other updated packages over the past month.

OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Beta 1 also adds in Dnfdragora as a graphical front-end package manager to DNF, replacing the old rpmdrake utility. Various other desktop packaging improvements were also made as part of the Lx 4.0 Beta.

More details on the OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Beta via OpenMandriva.org. The official 4.0 Beta media is based on the KDE Plasma 5 desktop as usual while having spins for generic x86_64 and AMD znver1 processors. OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 will hopefully be ready to ship in the months ahead as the long overdue update over the Lx 3.0 series that has been around since 2016.