For ending out the month of September the OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew released OpenMandriva ROME 26.0 as their long overdue release held up by various technical issues and a reported sabotage attempt to their platform. With OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 having been their last release, this is quite a big update.

OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 moves to LLVM Clang 23 as its default compiler, GCC 16.2 is also available, and RPM 6.1 provides the package management needs. This OpenMandriva update also adds a %pgo section to RPM SPEC files to make it easier and faster for applying compiler Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for packages that offer significant benefits from it. In addition, almost all of the OpenMandriva ROME packages are being built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) for greater performance too.

Some other package upgrades include the likes of Qt 6.11.2, GTK 4.22.5, and AMD ROCm 10.0. More AI applications have also been added to OpenMandriva ROME 26.09.

As a rather interesting move, OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 is now supporting Canonical's Snap packages in addition to Flatpaks, AppImage files, and its native RPMs.

The RISC-V and LoongArch 64-bit CPU architectures have also seen continued improvements with this OpenMandriva release. Rounding out the notable upgrades is the open-source NVIDIA kernel module now being distributed as part of the proper OpenMandriva official kernel.

Downloads and more details on this big OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 release via OpenMandriva.org.