OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, the long-awaited release of the independent, community controlled distribution’s fixed point release branch (as opposed to its rolling release branch), has been released.

This is expected to be the last major release featuring the Plasma 5 desktop.

In the 1.5 years since the previous fixed point release, OMLx 4.3, many things have changed.

Among others, the new release is based on kernel 6.6 LTS (kernel-desktop-6.6.2 - 6.7.0-rc2 is also available), Mesa 23.3.0-rc4, Qt 5.15.11+KDE Patches and 6.6.0, KDE Frameworks 5.112, KDE Gear 23.08.3, Plasma 5.27.9.1, LibreOffice 7.6.3, and other current Open Source software.

Outside of component updates, this is the first fixed point release that merges the / and /usr filesystems.

All recent security vulnerabilities (such as the frequently reported ones affecting glibc and curl) have been addressed as soon as relevant patches have been available.

We strongly recommend to all users of OMLx 4.x releases to proceed with a fresh installation of 5.0.

People using OpenMandriva ROME (Rolling release) or Cooker don’t need to update. All new features provided in 5.0 are already available on the rolling release branches and have been tested extensively there.

New variants of the distribution - such as a server centric spin and versions for various ARM boards, will follow shortly - we’re still working on the best way to bring features like a fully open graphics stack even on the Mali G610 GPU found, for example, in Rockchip 3588 boards. Current snapshots are promising.

A RISC-V port is also in progress, but will likely not be ready for a fixed point release before 6.0.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, in the backgrounds section we have included a parade of the most significant OpenMandriva wallpapers.