OpenSUSE Kalpa

Been running Aeon, the Gnome version of Kalpa, on my personal laptop for about six months now. I came from Tumbleweed so the learning curve wasn't steep. Overall the experience has been good!

The one major issue I had from the start was non-free Bluetooth codecs like AptX. That required me to taint the base image and add a non-official repo. It was messy but that was mostly down to it being a learning process, if I had to do it again I could probably do it with a single run of `transactional-update shell`.

The installer is super minimal and surprisingly user-friendly. One thing I remember is that there was zero partitioning choice: just use the full disk for encrypted btrfs and you get no swap (but zram swap is on by default). If you use OpenSUSE with secure boot enabled (as intended) then hibernate is prevented by `kernel_lockdown` anyway.

Snapper by default is nice, but you also get that with Tumbleweed. I ran into no applications that I couldn't get from Flatpaks or export from a distrobox, the latter being mostly for obscure stuff I need to compile myself. And my main toolbox hosts my Emacs environment that I spend most of my time in besides Firefox.

It's hard to recommend a MicroOS desktop over Tumbleweed, the latter being a great all-purpose distro as it is. But I'm hoping the benefits of forcing this "rootless" paradigm on myself will appear when it's time to move to a new machine. Just copy over my home directory and distroboxes and I'm golden, I could even switch to ARM without hesitation.

The distroboxes help with migrating because if I want to compile a newer version of that obscure program from earlier, I don't have to hunt down all the arcane requirements again. They're all still there waiting for me, in a Fedora/Ubuntu/Arch/whatever distrobox, depending on what works best for that program. At least that's the theory.

Happy to answer questions.

I am not sure I fully understand the usability trade-offs when it comes to these "atomic" distros. One the one hand, security seems to improve markedly, since the root filesystem is largely immutable. On the other hand, it does seem that a lot of straightforward things become harder. I generally dislike flatpaks and favor a low-level, bare-metal approach to things and atomic distros seem to go against that. Maybe I should just run some experiments in a VM.

I've installed https://getaurora.dev/en/, another atomic Linux distro, for a non technical user and find it really good. I've read arguments that its architecture was better than kalpa, but I don't find it back and I have no sufficient knowledge or experience of both to have an opinion.

This web page doesn't do a good job of motivating the reader.

I understand what the Plasma Desktop Environment is. But what is "atomic and transactional Linux"? What are the advantages to the alternatives? What other projects are similar? What is the motivation for this project in particular? Most importantly, why should I want to use it?

This blog post might provide useful context: https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-...

This is a cool idea, but it’s not clear what problem it’s solving. Tumbleweed is already great

Kalpa is great and hits way above its alpha status; I've been running it on my laptop for months now with zero issues. It's been really nice to not have to worry about updates, just gotta reboot it every now and then and most things just work.

I wanted to try an Atomic Linux, I think I tried the Fedora flavor, nothing really worked for me for some reason, I gave in to Arch and tried it a la EndeavourOS. Have not looked back since.

I've been using Aeon for about 8 months now and while I appreciate the intent and feel its well engineered, in practice I run into all sorts of edge cases where I'm fighting the system to do what I want to do. I'm sticking with it because I do learn interesting things in the process, and sunk cost fallacy, but I find it hard to recommend. I probably am too opinionated on my system to be the best target user though

This appears to be a "pre-beta" site, so this will be why it is not polished yet. From the documentation page :

"note: These installation instructions will be changing, with the Beta release of Kalpa"

A bit rough around the edges - so probably unfair to publicise too prominently yet.

Kalpa seems to be in eternal alpha, so I gave up and jumped ship to fedora kionite.

A screenshot is the bare minimum for such things.

Interesting they are hosting on codeberg. Opensuse has a pretty established hosting/build architecture provided by Suse.

This rules but the landing page could benefit from a Download Now type button for the iso page.

Are they still managing versions and rollback via BTRFS snapshots?

i misread the name as "Kapla" and thought it was a reference to the Klingon word "Qapla'"

Isn't OpenSUSE for sale? At the least distrowatch said this recently.

Has anyone had a good long term experience with Atomic?

I admittedly only used it on a 13 year old gaming computer and couldn't get the GPU drivers because... you know containers.

This is something trivial with a regular install. (Especially with LLMs to assist)

I want to like Atomic, but it feels like an Apple-like regression in computing.

since flatpacks/snaps/appimages are containerized-ish, i see no point in these immutable distros any more. also, cosmic is where the focus of linux desktop should be, not kde or gnome.

What's with the Ventoy hate. Every linux distro can be installed with Ventoy except for SuSe ones

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