The OpenMandriva project recently announced the release of OpenMandriva ROME 26.09, the latest edition of their distribution. This release follows a rolling release model, allowing users to access new package versions developed for the OpenMandriva Lx 7 branch without waiting for a traditional distribution release.
The project is now managed by the community under the non-profit organization “OpenMandriva Association” after Mandriva S.A. handed over project management. Users can download 3.2 GB iso images with KDE, GNOME, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce desktops that support downloading in Live mode.
Key features of this release include added support for Snap format packages, a migration to a new branch of the RPM package manager, and updates to KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, and MATE desktop environments. Additionally, there are new releases of MESA, Qt, GTK, ROCm, GStreamer, and PipeWire.
User applications have also been updated, including Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Audacity, Blender, VLC, OBS, GIMP, Amarok, Kitty, and Inkscape. The release also includes updates to AI-related packages and system components such as the Linux kernel, LLVM/Clang, GCC, glibc, and grub2. Preparations have been made for the possibility of switching between different implementations of malloc memory allocation functions in the standard C library Glibc.