OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 Released

It has been quite some time since the last ROME release — our rolling-release edition.

Since then, we have faced a number of challenges, including a lack of time, an attempted sabotage aimed at damaging our distribution, and numerous technical problems. However, we hope that these difficulties are now behind us and that we have emerged from them stronger. We apologize to our loyal users for the inconvenience and promise a more regular release cycle in the future.

While users of our rolling-release edition have been able to enjoy the latest updates for some time, it is only today, after extensive testing, that we have decided to release refreshed installation images.

Main new features and changes in ROME 26.09

The glibc library has been enhanced with support for interchangeable malloc implementations. Choosing the appropriate implementation can provide performance improvements of up to 20%. The current release contains only the necessary infrastructure; future releases will include configurations that select optimal malloc implementations for selected key applications.

We have updated our default compiler to LLVM/Clang 23, with the current version providing, among other things, improved code generation. We have also fixed a bug causing a clash between compiler-rt and libgcc_s, which could result in unexpected crashes in some applications.

GCC has been updated to 16.2.0. At the same time, we fixed an issue that caused some AppImage applications to crash when launched.

Our default package manager has been updated to RPM 6.1.0. Beyond the new features in upstream rpm 6, we have extended it with a new optional %pgo section in spec files, making it easier and faster to apply PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization) to packages. A number of packages have been updated to make use of this to provide better performance.

It is worth mentioning here that almost all of our packages are additionally built with LTO (Link-Time Optimization) enabled.

We have also updated the Qt6 libraries to 6.11.2, Qt5 to 5.15.19, GTK 4 to 4.22.5, and GTK3 to 3.24.52.

Another noteworthy achievement is the completion of work on our bootstrapping tool, which creates a minimal OpenMandriva build system, including chroot support, for new architectures. We have also generated a set of patches enabling bootstrapping for RISC-V and LoongArch64. For now, these ports remain available only in the Cooker branch, but the bootstrap script itself is already ready for release.

ROCm has been fixed and updated to 10.0.0. We have also added patches intended to enable ROCm to run on older Radeon GPUs.

The AI applications available in our repositories have been updated, and several new applications have been added. ROME includes, among others:

  • llama-cpp 0.4.1
  • ollama 0.34.3
  • whisper-cpp 1.9.4
  • koboldcpp 1.119
  • hermes-agent 2026.9.21
  • opencode 1.18.22
  • aider 0.86.2
  • goose 1.50.0
  • bark-cpp 1.0.0
  • stable-diffusion.cpp 0.841
  • comfyui 0.37.1

Many of these applications use the system-wide GGML 0.24.0 directly, built with GPU support through ROCm, Vulkan, or OpenCL.

The TeX Live stack has undergone a major rebuild and has been updated to the latest version.

  • Kernel has been updated to 7.2.7
  • Kernel-rc has been updated to 7.3.0-rc4

As a reminder, all our kernels are available both in the default version compiled with Clang and in a separate kernel-desktop-gcc version compiled with GCC.

We are also working on splitting kernel modules in order to reduce the size of installations such as server systems, where there is no need to install every available module automatically. Modules will instead be installed based on hardware currently connected to the computer. This work is still in progress and will appear in future releases.

The open NVIDIA kernel module has now been moved directly into the kernel. This means it will not fall out of sync with kernel updates again - you will no longer have to keep old kernels around to keep NVIDIA drivers working. The proprietary NVIDIA driver has been updated to 610.57.04.
The nvidia package available in the non-free repository contains both the closed-source kernel module and the driver GUI. The open-source kernel module included in the kernel does not support older GPUs such as Volta or Turing (10-series).

  • Plasma has been updated to 6.7.5, KDE Gear to 26.08.1, and KDE Frameworks to 6.29.0.
  • GNOME has been updated to 50.3.
  • All Xfce components have been updated to their latest stable versions; for Xfce itself, this means 4.20.x.
  • LXQt has been updated to 2.4.0.
  • MATE 1.28 has received a number of bug-fix updates, and an experimental Wayland session has also been added.
  • Spectrwm, an X11 tiling window manager that works particularly well with XLibre, has been added to the repositories.

Other desktop environments and window managers available from our repositories have also been updated, including:

  • hyprland 0.56.2
  • cosmic 1.7.0
  • niri 26.04
  • sway 1.12
  • i3-wm 4.25.1
  • icewm 4.1.0
  • qtile 0.36.0
  • labwc 0.20.2
  • miriway 26.08.1
  • enlightenment 0.27.1
  • enlightenment e16 1.0.32
  • and many others not listed above.

For many of these environments, we have also added updated companion tools such as Waybar 0.15.0, Wayle 0.7.0, hyprpanel, and Noctalia 5.1.0.

Snap support

In addition to native support for formats such as Flatpak (with the FlatHub repository enabled) and AppImage, OpenMandriva now also supports the Snap format developed by Canonical.

You can install it with:

sudo dnf install snapd

and then enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd

A system reboot is recommended, although not strictly necessary.

While we are adding support for other formats, we remain committed to native packages. Native packages result in less duplication, more code reuse (fix a big in libpng once and it is fixed in every application using it), and better integration overall. A native package should always be the first choice.

GNOME and Tears of Mandrake

The GNOME edition now includes the UPDragora GUI module. It allows users to update the system, perform selective updates, force --allowerasing, add --exclude options, and — as an alternative to Yumex — install and remove packages.

The module is part of the Tears of Mandrake project, a collection of GTK tools for system management and configuration.

The Tears of Mandrake application itself has also received a basic System Resources module, an experimental backup module, and a completely rewritten sound management module. The Sound Volume section now also includes an Equalizer powered by PipeWire.

Helium browser

The Helium browser has replaced ungoogled-chromium as the default browser for the Plasma and LXQt editions.

Helium is based on ungoogled-chromium and restores some of the functionality previously removed during the “de-Googling” process, while doing so in an open and spyware-free manner.

We have also ported CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) to use Helium as its engine. As a result, OBS Studio now supports a CEF plugin based on Helium.

Applications such as HPLIP and Clementine have also been ported by us to modern Qt6.

Krita has been updated to 6.0.4 and now uses Qt6. It is built with support for the AI plugins krita-ai-diffusion and krita-vision-tools, both of which are also available from our repositories.

Gaming

The Steam installer available from the non-free repository has been updated to 1.0.0.86.

For gamers — and users running Windows applications — our repositories also provide Proton, Valve’s Wine-based compatibility tool for running Windows games on Linux, updated to 11.0+20260808, as well as the proton-experimental and bleeding-edge versions.

Gamers also get DXVK 3.0.2, vkd3d 2.0, vkd3d-proton, and of course WINE 11.18 with WoW64 support.

Major distribution components updated

The following are some of the most important components updated in this release:

  • kernel 7.2.7
  • kernel-rc 7.3.0-rc4
  • rpm 6.1.0
  • LLVM/Clang 23.1.2
  • GCC 16.2.0
  • MESA 26.2.3
  • FFMPEG 9.0.2
  • GStreamer 1.28.6
  • PipeWire 1.6.9
  • Firefox 156.0
  • Thunderbird 155.0
  • LibreOffice 26.8.0.3
  • Rust 1.98.1
  • glibc 2.44
  • grub2 2.16
  • Helium 0.17.2
  • libva 2.24.1
  • WINE 11.18
  • Audacity 4.0.0
  • Blender 5.2.2
  • VLC 3.0.24
  • OBS 32.2.2
  • GIMP 3.2.4
  • Amarok 3.3.3
  • Kitty 0.48.2
  • LACT 0.10.1
  • Inkscape 1.4.4
  • GPU Screen Recorder 6.1.0

and many more.

Community

A notable community event was also the creation of an unofficial community Discord server, which you can join using the following invitation:

https://discord.gg/9mkuuRkzu9

Our main contact channel remains on the more Open Source friendly Matrix network - https://app.element.io/#/room/#openmandriva:matrix.org

Known bugs and issues

  • On some configurations with NVIDIA graphics cards, particularly when using the open-source driver, OM-Welcome may crash under Plasma X11.

  • When booting the Wayland LiveISO in VirtualBox, a black screen may occur. In this case, it may be necessary to set the VirtualBox graphics controller to VMSVGA for the boot process to complete correctly.

  • LiveISO images should boot without problems both on real hardware and in QEMU/KVM.

  • The Cosmic installation image was not released together with ROME 26.09 due to a problem with the login manager. Users who already have Cosmic installed from a previous ROME installation can update their systems and Cosmic should remain functional.

    New users can install Cosmic from the repository with:

sudo dnf install task-cosmic

If problems occur, changing the login manager from cosmic-greeter to GDM or SDDM is recommended.

Download

The updated OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 ISO installation images can be downloaded from SourceForge.

The images include our default Plasma 6 desktop in both X11 and Wayland variants.

The GNOME edition is also available with Wayland.

Community-maintained spins, including LXQt, MATE, and Xfce, are available as well.

The Plasma X11, Plasma Wayland, and LXQt editions are available for the x86_64 architecture, as well as in a specially optimized znver build for AMD Ryzen processors.

For the aarch64 architecture, we currently provide only the server image - please let us know if you are interested in a desktop version.

Various docker images are available directly on dockerhub.

We invite you to install, test, and report bugs.

We also encourage everyone to contribute and help us build the OpenMandriva distribution and community together.