I've been running Tumbleweed for a few years now. It's great, but it's not 100% autopilot, updates often require manual intervention (resolving small problems) or updates try to add 50 packages I don't need (recommends) all the time despite them not being in a pattern. I've been looking for a distro on which I could set up automatic updates and forget mostly about it, while still having recent packages; reliability and peace of mind while being on the bleeding edge. Due to having an NVIDIA GPU, LTS distros are a no-go. I've debated on the following
- Debian: packages too old, ideal for my server though.
- Ubuntu 24.04: Plasma 6 not available until next release. Snap is still a problem.
- Fedora/Ublue: DNF is painfully slow. Immutable variants are interesting but download full GBs worth of images
- Arch: insanely fast package manager, but can require manual intervention. Automatic updates aren't recommended for arch. It also lacks my printer driver on the repos (only available on the AUR). One of the only distros that can truly satisfy my minimalist itch.
- KDE Neon: Snaps, no nvidia graphics
- NixOS: Never tried it but apparently the unusual file structure causes many problems
So I ended up trying again OpenSUSE Kalpa. I had completely forgotten about it, and I really like the concept. It's like the Fedora immutable variants, but instead of downloading whole GBs of images, it creates BTRFS snapshots between normal zypper updates. So you can have the benefits of offline updates without having to wait at boot or at shutdown. Just like silverblue, the concept is to try to install everything through flatpak/distrobox and avoid adding anything unnecessary to the base, so that system updates can be snappy and unproblematic.
I was really tired of opening my laptop, updating everything and then rebooting. I just want to open my pc, have all updates automatically applied in the background through systemd units so that the next time I boot, I have an updated system. No "updating" during next boot. I finally found a distro perfect for me in that regard, and for everyone else who's tired of babysitting their linux desktops, you should give a shot to Kalpa/Aeon.
Inefficient data usage is a problem. Network connections arent free, there are people using metered networks, or with really bad bandwidth.
I am really interested in improving this.
I dont agree with "atomic distros are the future" as in my eyes Fedoras approach is the only good one really (and even that has tons of issues, see here).
Some things need to be improved:
So it may be worth the tradeoff for us both, but I definetly see a problem and I am also kinda tired of using podman containers for something they are not supposed to (system upgrades are impossible for example).
I want to experiment with the "linking all the system binaries to a podman container", the flatpak stuff needs to be solved by them.
Out of interest, hsve you heard/read much about VanillaOS and their AB partition system, and if so what do you make of that compared to Fedora Atomic?
Yes I have. I think they do the same as OpenSUSE microOS basically.
The live system is immutable, when updating they clone it to the other partition and run regular apt in there. (Not sure about that but I think). Same issue as on OpenSUSE [whatever they want to call these variants].
It sounds like the thing Android is doing, but in detail it is way less secure. I only know of rollback prevention and signing, so an update needs to be an update and cannot downgrade components. This may not be available there but idk.
And the entire boot process on any Linux distro is extremely insecure compared to Android/GrapheneOS on a Pixel.
Their "apk package manager" is just a wrapper for Distrobox, not solving any fundamental problem. But Distrobox for sure is awesome for closing the gaps.
I think uBlue with homebrew is doing something more sustainable here though, as homebrew is independent, well maintained (cross OS!) and does not rely on having a separate OS run in parallel. So if you imagine Fedora would only supply base packages in some future, a project like homebrew could take care of the rest.
Also I couldnt even get the Debian version installed in a Qemu VM, same as with EndlessOS, so yeah so much about "alternative immutable distros".