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.

  • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
    291·
    8 months ago

    I agree with you, that the future of Desktop Linux are the atomic Distros. They are more stable and require less intervention, so they can be used more easily by less knowledgeable users and users who prefer a stable OS(in the non-breaking way, not no updates). Making Linux more accessible for new users, is exactly what Linux needs.

    I disagree on your view about the Fedora atomic spins, especially universal blue. Who cares if the underlying OS downloads as one big image. It all happens in the background, you don’t notice that. Everytime you reboot, you are on an updated system.

    • j0rge@lemmy.ml
      7·
      8 months ago

      I disagree on your view about the Fedora atomic spins, especially universal blue. Who cares if the underlying OS downloads as one big image. It all happens in the background, you don’t notice that. Everytime you reboot, you are on an updated system.

      Universal Blue co-maintainer here, this is a temporary situation, efficient downloads are coming, I’m actually at the Red Hat Summit and have been discussing things with the right engineering teams. This involves an intersection of podman, ostree maintainers etc. all aligning on it. It’s definitely a priority for them to fix this.

      We’ve pushed pretty hard and pretty fast on the cloud native model, part of it was convincing people that this was a thing that users want, they hear us loud and clear now, it’s going to be an awesome year.

      • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
        3·
        8 months ago

        Thats great to hear! Boredsquirrel is right, the download size might not matter to me, but it’s important to improve for a lot of reasons, i can see that.

        Edit: For other people reading this, this is a nice read related to the download sizes and what can be done.

        On a side note: keep doing what you are doing. Your blog posts and the enthusiasm you displayed in your YouTube videos are what got me interested in universal blue in the first place.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
      62·
      8 months ago

      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:

      • flatpak runtimes share tons of packages but each gets downloaded individually, even though they may be deduplicated locally
      • podman containers just for installing packages dont need a separate system, it would be perfectly fine if they would just use a symlinked or otherwise deduplicated base system.
      • rpm-ostree has no delta update support, but afaik Fedora neither

      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.

      • aleph@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        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?

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
          3·
          8 months ago

          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”.