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.

  • boredsquirrel
    4•8 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
    • @[email protected]
      3•8 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.