The only distro that I have used in the past year and a half has been Fedora Workstation.
I have been using it on hardware only and using it for daily personal use,
but also for my hobby business, which is the only income I have.

Today, I was feeling like I needed to explore some other distros and I had
a new blank SSD available.       I had just updated Rawhide on my
primary NVMe and Fedora 33 on my secondary NVMe, so I had a pretty good
idea how they performed on a Ryzen 5 computer that I built two days ago.

I spent two hours trying to install Arch from scratch, and surrendered to
that idea.     I decided that since I had never tried OpenMandriva that I would
install their Alpha version ( 4.2 ).    I do not know if it was built with clang as they
advertise or brag about.

***The point to the discussion below is just to show some observations
related to rpm-based distros assuming that this first-hand info might encourage or discourage
a Fedora user from repeating what I just did. ***

So please hit delete button now, if that is not of interest.

I have been in OpenMandriva Alpha 4.2 ( Argon ) about 30 minutes,
and the similarities to Fedora 33 ( KDE ) are something worth mentioning.

One key difference is lots of KDE software is preinstalled, as are
things a new user to Linux might want like printer drivers, and codecs.
Flatpak was not preinstalled.     Falkon was the only web-browser and
Discover did not show another option.    dnfdragora was preinstalled
and showed Firefox 79 available.    So I went thru all the flatpak routine
in console and now writing this in Firefox 82.       The main thing I found that I did not
like about Falkon, is that Google does not support it.    So you can't log
into YouTube, Gmail, etc.    However, Youtube and over video sites played
out of the box.

Below are a few specs as a comparison to Fedora 33 ( after an update )

       Plasma                        5.19.4
       kernel                           5.8.13
       systemd                       246.20200827
       x11-server                   1.20.9
       qt                                 5.15.0
       dnf                               4.4.0
       rpm                             4.16.0
       KDE apps                   20.08
       KDE frameworks        5.73.0
       cups                            2.3.3
       libvulkan                      1.2.153
       mesa                           20.2.0-rc3
       libwayland                   1.18.0

This becomes a rolling-release upon updating, so it is not really 4.2 anymore and appears
to have a different repository than 4.2, so assuming this install never borks, I should never have to
reinstall it.   Right ?     The iso was published around July 27.    I did an update
using dnf but then a bunch of stuff updated after that in Discover.  

Filesystem installed was ext4.     

I just see now that they had a iso optimized for Ryzen users.    So I guess
I should reinstall it.   LOL !

I do not think Fedora lovers would like OpenMandriva, as it comes with
stuff like Midnight Commander and emoji picker and lots of wallpapers
pre-installed or with an easy click in Discover.     I doubt Ubuntu and
Manjaro / Arch users would like OpenMandriva.

One disclaimer, is that my opinion or statements above are partially
biased, as I lived in Mageia 6 on hardware for six months, before it was published and
lived in ROSA R11 for a month on hardware before coming to Fedora.

Feel free to email me privately, if you think I can offer more details, or reply
to this post if there is something Fedora related to mention.    I can only guess there
are one or two people out there that use both Fedora and OpenMandriva, or shared
development of KDE.

I think what discourages some users from trying it or using it is the name "OpenMandriva."
Imagine another dimension of time and space where Mandrake Linux, never lost a lawsuit.


David Locklear