Why pre-Alpha? Because we are eager to deliver you the freshest and hottest, and with your help this new release can start shining brighter even sooner! Have fun, report bugs, enjoy!

You can download pre-Alpha here

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmandriva/files/alpha/2015.0/

Please check out the release notes here

https://wiki.openmandriva.org/en/Release_3/Release_Notes

So what is in?

Desktop

The oma-welcome oma-welcome, or Welcome to OpenMandriva Lx has been updated to reflect the new version. This application introduces users to OpenMandriva Lx and shows them some of the features we have, as well as providing quick links to common tasks such as updating, installing new software, and configuring a desktop.

Xorg

We’ve upgraded Xorg to version 1.16.3, and Mesa to 10.4.2, which brings the latest free drivers for the best performance. A Compose cache is now incorporated which speeds up application startup time and reduces memory usage especially in locales with large Compose tables (e.g. all UTF-8 locales).

We recommend that users change the composite manager in KDE from XRender to OpenGL mode. This gives transparency the proper blur effect. This also allows our theme and it’s decorations to be shown at their best.

KDE 4.14.3

We’ve upgraded to the latest and greatest version of the KDE desktop. If you don’t know what KDE is, learn more at their website.

We’ve switched our default menu launcher to Homerun kicker. To learn more about Homerun, check out its features page.

The network management, media centre, and mobile device support has also been updated.

KF 5.x

We are working to bring fully working KDE Framwork 5.x as our new default desktop, replacing KDE 4.x.

SDDM

SDDM is new and lightweight displaymanager, written in Qt5 with QML and provides new features and benefits to enduser, compared to KDM.

LXQt 0.8.0

We have prepared LXQt for our alpha release. LXQt is a lightweight desktop fully written in Qt5.

By default SDDM is used as display manager.

xfce4 4.10.0

xfce4 is very lightweight environment based on GTK+2.0, featuring speed, low request on resources combined with great look.

Wayland

We are working on many new and interesting shells using new display technology based on Wayland. Currently planned are:

hawaii
papyros-os
orbital

Currently only Weston is working out of box.

LibreOffice 4.3.5

The latest LibreOffice featuring much faster load times and many bug fixes.

Firefox 35

The latest firefox with it’s new graphical interface and all the latest features.

You may wish to suspend desktop effects when Firefox is in full screen mode, as it speeds up scrolling.

Java 7-8

The OpenMandriva Java stack has been entirely rebuilt to version 7 and is completely functional.

We currently provide Eclipse Kepler by default.

Printing

Improved support for printing, with an emphasis on the latest HP printers.

Cloud service

We added support for owncloud.org via mirall package.

systemd

Default init system is systemd with version 218. By default are enabled;

systemd-networkd
systemd-timedated
systemd-timesyncd
systemd-resolved

LCMS

We have updated our LCMS to version 2.x, also all software which was dependant on older library has been rebuilded to meet new one.

libarchive

We have decided to make better use of libarchive, and starting from this release by default we use:

bsdtar as a default tar program
bsdcpio as a default cpio program

Detailed features and benefits can be found here.

Perl

Perl base package has been updated to 5.20.1 version. All perl related software in main repository has been rebuilded to meet new version.

Python

Python has been updated to 3.4.3 version and starting from now it became default python interpreter over python 2.x.

ISO build tools

Previously livecd-tools were used to build OpenMandriva ISO images. Due to code complication and its limits, we moved to build own ISO image build tool.

omdv-build-tool is written as a bash shell script, which works out of box on ABF.io and in userland.