OpenMandriva Instead of Ubuntu?

Reasons for Ubuntu:
1. It's a corporate backed distro
2. Relatively stable on 99.99% of hardware
3. Largest user base in the Linux world
4. Lots of support

Reasons against Ubuntu:
1. It's a corporate backed distro (this is it's biggest problem) And no Pop!OS is not any better. It's still a corporate backed distro.
2. Has a stated an ultimate goal of moving to all snap applications - the snaps themselves are open source but the backend is propriatary
3. The large user base causes problems with support. Many apps that used to work in 16.04 does not work in 24.04 or even 1 version difference.
4. While it's good for cutting your teeth on Linux it is not good for learning Linux. You end up learning Ubuntu.

OpenMandriva - https://openmandriva.org

Is a independent distro and direct descendant of Mandriva. It is not based on Debian, Fedora, Red Hat or any of the other big distros.
Reasons for OpenMandriva Lx (OMLx)
1. Its NOT a corporate backed distro. It is solely a community based distro. This means you will get to talk directly with the devs. The ones who have a passion for the distro. Not someone getting paid to work on it as a job.
2. It's a "rolling distro". Meaning you install it once and just keep updating as they come out.
3. While it uses dnf and rpms for packaging, it is not RedHat/Fedora.
4. For us noobs, you are learning "the Linux way." Not a corporate backed distro's way of doing things.
5. While it does have other deskop spins those are not the "official" version. The official version is currently using KDE Plasma6.
6. The community and devs are unabashedly all about the distro, the code and making it work. They love people and work hard to keep politics out of the software.
7. They wont tell you to RTFM. But they do expect you to have done some actual leg work on your own before asking them to fix something. After being in the user land of the Linux desktop world, I can verify that 75-80% of a users issue is caused by the user's ignorance or arrogance of any distro. Just do your research, try a couple of things first and then ask if you still dont get it. It's really not hard to learn something new. It's harder to admit when you were wrong.

OMLx Rome 25.01

I've been using it as a daily driver on all of my machines for about almost a month now. It's awesome, looks beautiful and has worked 100% of the time I boot up.
It has Plasma 6.2.5 on KDE Frameworks 6.10.0 running on X11 (cause it works, unlike Wayland) and I am on kernel 6.12.9-desktop=1omv2490.

I've installed so much stuff since my first install that I dont remember what exactly is the list of apps installed by default. So I will cover a couple of what I think are unique to OMLx.
- Welcome - A great place to start to learn about OMLx and how to use it.
- DNFDrake -Appcenter the recommended way to update and upgrade in a gui app.
- FlatDrake - Appcenter for Flatpaks
- DNFDragora -Older appcenter? Not sure. But it works as advertised.

I will be doing more reviews about the apps as I get more along with using the distro.

I think it is safe to say that the OMLx devs and the community is going to have to bite the bullet and put up with me. Because I'm keeping this as my forever distro. I honestly thought I would never leave Ubuntu. But OMLx is just too good to ignore. I honestly wish that I would've tried it a year or two ago when I ran across it.
Just do yourself a favor and give it a try. It's a really great feeling and makes it fun to boot into a distro that doesn shove political opinions in your face at every turn. It's even better when that distro works better than all the other distros I've tried over the last 14 yrs.