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.

  • swooosh@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Speed of a package manager should never be a major concern nowadays. It’s not like you have to build packages from source slow. You install packages once, even if it takes minutes, just do something else. Updates happen in the background.

    Same for huge updates. For one, are you sure it downloads the whole image? Downloading an update of fedora atomic is very fast on my device. Even then, games are huge, 4k movies are huge. An OS updates is small. I don’t care about that size. That is nothing of importance.

    The real question is: image vs snapshot. What do you think about that question?

    • 柊 つかさ@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Speed of a package manager should never be a major concern nowadays.

      I would like to disagree with this. It’s not just updates. Sometimes I add and remove a bunch of packages back to back to test stuff out or check soft dependencies or pull/remove dependencies for projects I am checking out and compiling or switch between prepackaged/compiled versions. For example I was once testing the difference between wine and wine-stable-ubuntu in combination with winetricks installed/uninstalled. That is four configurations and you might visit each one more than once. I once saw a classmate use the fedora package manager in real life and I thought it was quite slow. I am happy with pacman, it really rips through packages which is convenient.

      • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
        0·
        6 months ago

        That sounds like a usecase for distrobox or toolbx, and not something an average user would need to consider for choosing a distro

  • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
    0·
    6 months ago

    Please tell me more about OpenSuse Kalpa/ Aeon/ MicroOS.

    I’m a huge fan of Fedora Atomic, but find Suse interesting as well.

    What are the differences between the two?

    • Layering packages (rpm-ostree alternative?)
    • Are updates still reproducible and atomic?
    • What is the difference between Tumbleweed and Kalpa? You named snapshots. Are they different from Snapper?
    • Can you rebase between Aeon and Kalpa?
    • Why Suse and not Fedora?
    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
      0·
      6 months ago

      As far as I understood their package manager is just zypper with enforced snapshots.

      1. It is not layering, it is just installing like regular. There is no base, no image, just the base packages that are managed traditionally. This will just add another package and there is no way to revert it
      2. Updates are atomic, but they are not reproducible, as there is no real base. You cant just use rpm-ostree status, reset and install the layered packages, as there is no reset. There is no way to revert back to the currently shipped base OS. You can only revert back the snapshots that were created every update, so you could keep a snapshot of the fresh install, and that would be somewhat a reset, but reset to completely outdated packages, causing likely dotfile conflicts etc.
      3. The OS is always atomic and snapshots are enforced, changes have to be made to the next deployment / BTRFS snapshot and the live base system is read only afaik.
      4. There is no rebase. And Kalpa is officially unmaintained. And there are no other variants than the 2 :/
      5. No idea
      • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
        0·
        6 months ago

        Thanks for your answer.

        This may sound harsh, but I’m glad I’m on Fedora Atomic. Suse sounds a bit shitty/ not much better than the regular edition.

        As distro desktop hopper, the ability to rebase to other spins is one major aspect of using Atomic, and I use it all the time.

  • Unskilled5117@feddit.de
    0·
    6 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
      0·
      6 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
        0·
        6 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.