8 ms·

Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers

149 points by signa11 2y ago

yellowapple 2y ago
I've been using (what eventually evolved into) Aeon for about a year now on my primary desktop and it's been absolutely perfect as a daily driver, especially with some choice GNOME extensions like PaperWM. Unfortunately, the switch to the new Tik-based installer resulted in a loss of full-disk encryption support, so until that gets re-added I'm in a bit of a pickle when it comes to installing it on any future machines (including my shiny new Framework 16).
jmercouris 2y ago
I don't see how this is for lazy developers, it seems that you'll need to learn a new system with new quirks and probably make your own packages.
- teleforce 2y ago
  From the article the desktop is for "who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration", that's their definition of lazy.
  - nikanj 2y ago
    But what that mean in practice? Every Linux distro promises they are the ”works out of the box” one
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > But what that mean in practice? I think the key idea is that this system is meant to require zero maintenance; it automates updates, it provides rollbacks if anything goes wrong, it prevents most ways of modifying the OS and sticks applications in containers/sandboxes. > Every Linux distro promises they are the ”works out of the box” one Well not every - Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Slackware, NixOS...
      - teleforce 2y ago
        Funny that you mentioned these distro but I've never installed them, perhaps installed Slackware once, more than 20 years ago then just used Red Hat 7 (the original 7 not the later 7 version). After that Ubuntu and its derivatives. What people don't realized that most of the Windows and MacOS users never installed their desktop OS, it come pre-installed. The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with. Tried to installed Gentoo when it's initially released but it's a death by thousand cuts if you know what I meant, conflict after conflict resolution, and painfully slow installation process due to it's a source based distro. If Aeon can work as promised, I think it will be a huge success provided that they solve the installation nightmare of many Linux OS and install seamlessly on mainstream laptop hardware.
        BossingAround 2y ago
        > The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with. You know, I realized this recently, as I was updating the HW in my desktop PC. After days of trying to figure out why an AMD GPU is power throttling (and thus giving me ~20% of the performance I paid for), I just gave up and installed Windows. It pains me (and honestly, it's a huge pain to set up Windows from scratch as well), but at least the proprietary driver blobs that you can download work as advertised. This really showed me that in my free time, I don't want to futz around with setting up my HW on Linux. I just want to use it. And even though I bought a computer that officially supports Linux (intel nuc extreme), the experience of setting it up is pretty bad even for me, a software engineer who's been using and administering Linux for the past ~15 years at work.
        nineteen999 2y ago
        > Tried to installed Gentoo when it's initially released but it's a death by thousand cuts Try rolling your own LFS distro (Linux from Scratch) sometime. It will make Gentoo seem like a Fisher Price toy. Plus you'll learn way, way more.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    I am confused at the "for developer" bit. How does it different from, say, a lazy desktop for non-developer?
- stryan 2y ago
  You only need to make your own packages if you're not already building containers, flatpaks, or RPM's, though RPMs are discouraged.
- type0 2y ago
  I tried it, in my mind it lacks customizable options that many devs would like to have. Bluefin DX (Fedora Silverblue remix) is slightly better option if you develop for cloud services.
dudus 2y ago
Is SUSE still used by anyone other than SAP or other German businesses?
- wtf77 2y ago
  tumbleweed here, rocking solid since last year (switched from MacOS)
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed as my main OS in recent years.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I think they’re talking about large corps/businesses/governments, not individual users
    - theodric 2y ago
      I rather think "anyone" includes all comers, not just corporations
- chefandy 2y ago
  I use tumbleweed. In my line of work I need the official Nvidia divers and I 'prefer' to leave secure boot enabled. Tumbleweed makes that a huge pain in the ass... which is much better than most distros, where it's often impossible. Pop OS is the smoothest official Nvidia experience, but they don't support secure boot.
  - brnt 2y ago
    Hmm, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora seemed to do this fine on my system. No futzing required.
    - woodson 2y ago
      Yes, it should work just fine with mokutils.
winrid 2y ago
does "getting stuff done" include having the Gnome password prompt consistently lose focus and send your password into background applications because it does that a lot
- sysrich 2y ago
  I’ve never had that happen.. what password prompts are you referencing?
  - winrid 2y ago
    The password prompt when you try to do an admin action via the UI, and it happened at like once a week on PopOS before I switched to xfce.
    - logicprog 2y ago
      I've never had that happen to me either. Maybe it was just due to some Pop COSMIC extension
      - winrid 2y ago
        COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that. I'm pretty sure it's a window manager issue. gksudo (?) requests focus, and then while you're typing something happens and your keyboard loses focus on the password field and keystrokes go to an app behind that window. there were also other fun things like running an app in a debugger, then setting a breakpoint in that app triggered by a UI event, would then immediately cause the entire desktop environment to lockup to mouse events. you'd have to use the keyboard to trigger the "application unresponsive" window and then tab to "close".
        logicprog 2y ago
        > COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that. I'm not referring to that, I'm referring to the "COSMIC" extensions to GNOME that PopOS adds to reshape GNOME into their vision of a desktop environment (the vision is what they call COSMIC). Those COSMIC extensions are the predecessor to the COSMIC DE, which is a standalone instantiation and elaboration of that vision, and have been part of PopOS and enabled by default for a very long time. The COSMIC extensions are extremely extensive, substantially changing several huge aspects of gnome, as well as being written in typescript, then compiled to JavaScript and then translated into GJS with a — I kid you not — a sed script. So I think it's entirely possible that your problems could have been caused by those extensive extensions, and not the gnome window manager itself. Especially since other users of gnome haven't shared your experiences. There's also the fact that pop OS's version of gnome is now more than 2 years behind and they still haven't updated it, since they are holding back waiting for cosmic de to be ready instead, so you may have been experiencing a bug that has long been fixed for everyone else. System 76 seems to try to do their best to update a lot of the packages in pop os's repos, but they can't keep everything artificially up to date since they aren't tracking Upstream Ubuntu updates anymore, either, since all of their resources are going to Cosmic de, so a whole bunch of packages including for instance node are two years out of date on PopOS, not just gnome, incidentally.
littlecranky67 2y ago
Feels like a step backwards that I have to reboot the system for every update.
- BossingAround 2y ago
  The same applies on Steam Deck. This is a thing with immutable systems.
- sysrich 2y ago
  Only for the updates of the base OS. Updates to flatpak apps and distroboxes don’t need an update And the actual download and install happens in the background before the reboot So a 20 second reboot is hardly a huge cost for a much more solid update mechanisms
  - mikedelfino 2y ago
    I'm not the person you're replying to, but what annoys me about this on Fedora is that I use full disk encryption in my notebook, so I need to type the password after the reboot for the updates and then one more time to get it running again. I wish it could deactivate all services and somewhat return to a state similar to early boot in order to apply the updates, rebooting only once afterward. This would be especially useful for shutdown updates, in which case no password would be necessary.
    - jpeeler 2y ago
      I was hoping that systemd's soft reboot function would help a lot here. It would make it unnecessary to request password when using full disk encryption and would require less downtime. Last I checked it didn't work in Silverblue though.
    - lye 2y ago
      https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-tpm2-fido2-pkcs11-security-hardware-on-systemd-248.html https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-tpm2-...
- 2y ago
bjoli 2y ago
I run it for the base system, and then use gnu Guix for the rest. I don't have time to deal with a system that changes under my feet. Being able to rollback both the base system and userland has saved me twice. It also means I can use one tool for userland things instead of both distrobox and flatpak. Until I am smart enough to run guixSD completely this feels like a decent compromise.
throwaway89988 2y ago
I tried out Aeon a while back and mostly liked the idea, but not so sure about the execution. First, last time they had no firewall and the main developer thinks a firewall is not needed. I disagree strongly and won't run an OS w/o firewall. (https://forums.opensuse.org/t/micro-os-suse-aeon-compared-to-fedora-silverblue/167663/46 https://forums.opensuse.org/t/micro-os-suse-aeon-compared-to...) Second, getting everything from flatpak would be a good idea, if the software I need would be available as certified flatpaks. Downloading random flatpaks is IMHO the same as downloading random executables. Third, the AARCH64 version is not distributed anymore (this was the version I tried/used), AFAIK because the initial install script could not download the non-existent Firefox for AARCH64 flatpak (thanks Mozilla). In the end I still like the idea of Aeon and hope they change their positions concerning firewalls. Points two and three are obviously not Aeons to fix, so I hope we as a community (and Mozilla) get there in time.
- athrun 2y ago
  the firewall question is interesting. I guess I understand their perspective: If nothing is listening/running then what’s the point of the firewall? The system is immutable so the security posture is a known quantity and cannot change at runtime. You could argue that running an additional firewall service would actually be increasing the attack surface, in the sense that more code is worse than the absence of code. Not sure I agree with their stance, but good on them for having the courage to revisit some our default assumptions. Some decisions will work out and others they’ll have to finetune.
  - raesene9 2y ago
    I can see where the no firewall argument is coming from and definitely on my own Linux laptop, I try and keep the number of ports listening down as much as possible, but it is tricky and it requires a lot of vigilance as sometimes applications you wouldn't expect to, will start services. Things like Spotify and Steam can open ports. So having a firewall running can provide a bit of extra protection in case you don't always check to see what ports you have open/listening.
jpgvm 2y ago
I feel like most of these systems tradeoff too much simplicity. I've been using ArchLinux for ~14 years now, previous to that I used Slackware and Gentoo. IMO it's better to be simple, yes there aren't any guarantees but worst case scenario I can rebuild, run my install script (which might require a few tweaks if it's been a while since I setup a new system), push new keys etc and then I'm up and running again in ~15 mins. i.e I think it's easier to repair or replace a simple system than it is to try work out how to do novel things on a complicated but safe system. I intend to try NixOS at some point as a foray into these more complicated but "safer"/transactional/immutable/deterministic systems but I just haven't found the motivation yet.
- m1n7 2y ago
  i think it's possible to have both. we just haven't decided how to implement these improvements, that's why we see so many different immutable/snapshot/… distros with lacking ux — for now
- struanr 2y ago
  Personally I went from Arch to NixOS and now back to Arch. Whilst I can appreciate the power of NixOS it felt like such a huge amount of abstraction and secret sauce it made it impossible to fit in my head. In addition, the documentation and debugging experience of the Nix language were very poor. Nix shell was useful for trying out programs temporarily, however I found it a poor substitute for native Python and Julia package managers, especially for scientific work where a requirements.txt is useful to a lot more people than a flake.nix Going back to Arch has felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything is simple, easy to understand and incredibility well documented. Using a snapper pacman hook I can now revert my system to undo updates, which was the main functionality I found useful in NixOS.
  - sandbach 2y ago
    It's worth noting that the benefits of Nix shell you mention can be enjoyed from the comfort of another distro with the Nix package manager.
- leetnewb 2y ago
BossingAround 2y ago
Whenever SUSE is mentioned, I remember their songs, e.g. how to pronounce SUSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLdexZlVkAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLdexZlVkAY
- fileeditview 2y ago
  I mean the song is funny but it's hilarious that they still mispronounce it.. he constantly sings susAH instead of susEH .. how it should be pronounced, at least if you pronounce it as a German word.
  - artificial 2y ago
    “Zooz-eh” for English speakers who are curious: https://translate.google.de/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=SUSE&op=translate https://translate.google.de/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=SUSE&op=tran...
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      the only guy I've ever known to correctly pronounce SUSE was an older fellow who was, towards the end of the 00s, pronouncing "Ethernet" with a short e, as though it were to rhyme with "meth" anyway, that's why I'll always call it Soos even if I know I'm wrong that guy probably also pronounced it "GIF" but it's been too long to say for sure
      - bear8642 2y ago
        >pronouncing "Ethernet" with a short e, as though it were to rhyme with "meth" Well it's a network across the ether (æther) right? :-D
- moffkalast 2y ago
  And I get reminded of amogus.
aitchnyu 2y ago
Has anybody tried Spiral and Gecko? Same developer adapted Debian Sid and Suse Tumbleweed with btrfs snapshot after each install. How did they/similar systems work in practice for you?
curt15 2y ago
Looks like it uses btrfs for everything. Btrfs performs notoriously poorly for VMs and databases without the "nocow" hack, which is a no-no for raid1 setups. What should I do if I'm an Android developer who frequently tests code in Android VMs?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Separate root and home partitions brother. As in, keep root on BTRFS for rollbacks and keep home on extf4 where you keep.all your dbs and VMs. This way you get best if both worlds, no need to mess with nocow parameters.
LorenDB 2y ago
There's also openSUSE Kalpa, which is like Aeon but with KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.
kombine 2y ago
Tumbleweed is a very solid distro, one could also use it as an "immutable" distro by installing the software from Flatpaks and distrobox. Been using it for more than a year after a decade on Ubuntu.
- jacooper 2y ago
  I found zyppet to be quite slow even compare to DNF which is notorious for being slow. Also it's not very well supported in the community, I guess distrobox fixes this.
- JHonaker 2y ago
  The fact that I can go months without updating a rolling distro and things very rarely break is incredible. Tumbleweed is rock solid. (Personally, I've never experienced a break, but I know one just happened for a lot of people. Granted, I believe it was Nvidia or Mesa drivers at fault.)
KolenCh 2y ago
I use OpenSUSE Leap with transactional server, which is another immutable distribution by SUSE. I run it on my storage node primarily serving a ZFS pool over the network. This means the server is more like an appliance (NAS) and this immutable setup is a perfect fit IMO. I suppose I could have use Aeon instead? But I like having OpenSUSE Leap across the fleet too which others doing more heavy lifting.

149 points by signa11 2y ago

I've been using (what eventually evolved into) Aeon for about a year now on my primary desktop and it's been absolutely perfect as a daily driver, especially with some choice GNOME extensions like PaperWM. Unfortunately, the switch to the new Tik-based installer resulted in a loss of full-disk encryption support, so until that gets re-added I'm in a bit of a pickle when it comes to installing it on any future machines (including my shiny new Framework 16).

jmercouris 2y ago

I don't see how this is for lazy developers, it seems that you'll need to learn a new system with new quirks and probably make your own packages.

teleforce 2y ago
From the article the desktop is for "who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration", that's their definition of lazy.
- nikanj 2y ago
  But what that mean in practice? Every Linux distro promises they are the ”works out of the box” one
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > But what that mean in practice? I think the key idea is that this system is meant to require zero maintenance; it automates updates, it provides rollbacks if anything goes wrong, it prevents most ways of modifying the OS and sticks applications in containers/sandboxes. > Every Linux distro promises they are the ”works out of the box” one Well not every - Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Slackware, NixOS...
    - teleforce 2y ago
      Funny that you mentioned these distro but I've never installed them, perhaps installed Slackware once, more than 20 years ago then just used Red Hat 7 (the original 7 not the later 7 version). After that Ubuntu and its derivatives. What people don't realized that most of the Windows and MacOS users never installed their desktop OS, it come pre-installed. The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with. Tried to installed Gentoo when it's initially released but it's a death by thousand cuts if you know what I meant, conflict after conflict resolution, and painfully slow installation process due to it's a source based distro. If Aeon can work as promised, I think it will be a huge success provided that they solve the installation nightmare of many Linux OS and install seamlessly on mainstream laptop hardware.
      - BossingAround 2y ago
        > The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with. You know, I realized this recently, as I was updating the HW in my desktop PC. After days of trying to figure out why an AMD GPU is power throttling (and thus giving me ~20% of the performance I paid for), I just gave up and installed Windows. It pains me (and honestly, it's a huge pain to set up Windows from scratch as well), but at least the proprietary driver blobs that you can download work as advertised. This really showed me that in my free time, I don't want to futz around with setting up my HW on Linux. I just want to use it. And even though I bought a computer that officially supports Linux (intel nuc extreme), the experience of setting it up is pretty bad even for me, a software engineer who's been using and administering Linux for the past ~15 years at work.
      - nineteen999 2y ago
        > Tried to installed Gentoo when it's initially released but it's a death by thousand cuts Try rolling your own LFS distro (Linux from Scratch) sometime. It will make Gentoo seem like a Fisher Price toy. Plus you'll learn way, way more.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  I am confused at the "for developer" bit. How does it different from, say, a lazy desktop for non-developer?
stryan 2y ago
You only need to make your own packages if you're not already building containers, flatpaks, or RPM's, though RPMs are discouraged.
type0 2y ago
I tried it, in my mind it lacks customizable options that many devs would like to have. Bluefin DX (Fedora Silverblue remix) is slightly better option if you develop for cloud services.

dudus 2y ago

Is SUSE still used by anyone other than SAP or other German businesses?

wtf77 2y ago
tumbleweed here, rocking solid since last year (switched from MacOS)
badsectoracula 2y ago
I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed as my main OS in recent years.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I think they’re talking about large corps/businesses/governments, not individual users
  - theodric 2y ago
    I rather think "anyone" includes all comers, not just corporations
chefandy 2y ago
I use tumbleweed. In my line of work I need the official Nvidia divers and I 'prefer' to leave secure boot enabled. Tumbleweed makes that a huge pain in the ass... which is much better than most distros, where it's often impossible. Pop OS is the smoothest official Nvidia experience, but they don't support secure boot.
- brnt 2y ago
  Hmm, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora seemed to do this fine on my system. No futzing required.
  - woodson 2y ago
    Yes, it should work just fine with mokutils.

winrid 2y ago

does "getting stuff done" include having the Gnome password prompt consistently lose focus and send your password into background applications because it does that a lot

sysrich 2y ago
I’ve never had that happen.. what password prompts are you referencing?
- winrid 2y ago
  The password prompt when you try to do an admin action via the UI, and it happened at like once a week on PopOS before I switched to xfce.
  - logicprog 2y ago
    I've never had that happen to me either. Maybe it was just due to some Pop COSMIC extension
    - winrid 2y ago
      COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that. I'm pretty sure it's a window manager issue. gksudo (?) requests focus, and then while you're typing something happens and your keyboard loses focus on the password field and keystrokes go to an app behind that window. there were also other fun things like running an app in a debugger, then setting a breakpoint in that app triggered by a UI event, would then immediately cause the entire desktop environment to lockup to mouse events. you'd have to use the keyboard to trigger the "application unresponsive" window and then tab to "close".
      - logicprog 2y ago
        > COSMIC is the new rust-based DE that's still in alpha right? I wasn't using that. I'm not referring to that, I'm referring to the "COSMIC" extensions to GNOME that PopOS adds to reshape GNOME into their vision of a desktop environment (the vision is what they call COSMIC). Those COSMIC extensions are the predecessor to the COSMIC DE, which is a standalone instantiation and elaboration of that vision, and have been part of PopOS and enabled by default for a very long time. The COSMIC extensions are extremely extensive, substantially changing several huge aspects of gnome, as well as being written in typescript, then compiled to JavaScript and then translated into GJS with a — I kid you not — a sed script. So I think it's entirely possible that your problems could have been caused by those extensive extensions, and not the gnome window manager itself. Especially since other users of gnome haven't shared your experiences. There's also the fact that pop OS's version of gnome is now more than 2 years behind and they still haven't updated it, since they are holding back waiting for cosmic de to be ready instead, so you may have been experiencing a bug that has long been fixed for everyone else. System 76 seems to try to do their best to update a lot of the packages in pop os's repos, but they can't keep everything artificially up to date since they aren't tracking Upstream Ubuntu updates anymore, either, since all of their resources are going to Cosmic de, so a whole bunch of packages including for instance node are two years out of date on PopOS, not just gnome, incidentally.

littlecranky67 2y ago

Feels like a step backwards that I have to reboot the system for every update.

BossingAround 2y ago
The same applies on Steam Deck. This is a thing with immutable systems.
sysrich 2y ago
Only for the updates of the base OS. Updates to flatpak apps and distroboxes don’t need an update And the actual download and install happens in the background before the reboot So a 20 second reboot is hardly a huge cost for a much more solid update mechanisms
- mikedelfino 2y ago
  I'm not the person you're replying to, but what annoys me about this on Fedora is that I use full disk encryption in my notebook, so I need to type the password after the reboot for the updates and then one more time to get it running again. I wish it could deactivate all services and somewhat return to a state similar to early boot in order to apply the updates, rebooting only once afterward. This would be especially useful for shutdown updates, in which case no password would be necessary.
  - jpeeler 2y ago
    I was hoping that systemd's soft reboot function would help a lot here. It would make it unnecessary to request password when using full disk encryption and would require less downtime. Last I checked it didn't work in Silverblue though.
  - lye 2y ago
    https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-tpm2-fido2-pkcs11-security-hardware-on-systemd-248.html https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-tpm2-...
2y ago

bjoli 2y ago

I run it for the base system, and then use gnu Guix for the rest. I don't have time to deal with a system that changes under my feet. Being able to rollback both the base system and userland has saved me twice. It also means I can use one tool for userland things instead of both distrobox and flatpak. Until I am smart enough to run guixSD completely this feels like a decent compromise.

throwaway89988 2y ago

I tried out Aeon a while back and mostly liked the idea, but not so sure about the execution. First, last time they had no firewall and the main developer thinks a firewall is not needed. I disagree strongly and won't run an OS w/o firewall. (https://forums.opensuse.org/t/micro-os-suse-aeon-compared-to-fedora-silverblue/167663/46 https://forums.opensuse.org/t/micro-os-suse-aeon-compared-to...) Second, getting everything from flatpak would be a good idea, if the software I need would be available as certified flatpaks. Downloading random flatpaks is IMHO the same as downloading random executables. Third, the AARCH64 version is not distributed anymore (this was the version I tried/used), AFAIK because the initial install script could not download the non-existent Firefox for AARCH64 flatpak (thanks Mozilla). In the end I still like the idea of Aeon and hope they change their positions concerning firewalls. Points two and three are obviously not Aeons to fix, so I hope we as a community (and Mozilla) get there in time.

athrun 2y ago
the firewall question is interesting. I guess I understand their perspective: If nothing is listening/running then what’s the point of the firewall? The system is immutable so the security posture is a known quantity and cannot change at runtime. You could argue that running an additional firewall service would actually be increasing the attack surface, in the sense that more code is worse than the absence of code. Not sure I agree with their stance, but good on them for having the courage to revisit some our default assumptions. Some decisions will work out and others they’ll have to finetune.
- raesene9 2y ago
  I can see where the no firewall argument is coming from and definitely on my own Linux laptop, I try and keep the number of ports listening down as much as possible, but it is tricky and it requires a lot of vigilance as sometimes applications you wouldn't expect to, will start services. Things like Spotify and Steam can open ports. So having a firewall running can provide a bit of extra protection in case you don't always check to see what ports you have open/listening.

jpgvm 2y ago

I feel like most of these systems tradeoff too much simplicity. I've been using ArchLinux for ~14 years now, previous to that I used Slackware and Gentoo. IMO it's better to be simple, yes there aren't any guarantees but worst case scenario I can rebuild, run my install script (which might require a few tweaks if it's been a while since I setup a new system), push new keys etc and then I'm up and running again in ~15 mins. i.e I think it's easier to repair or replace a simple system than it is to try work out how to do novel things on a complicated but safe system. I intend to try NixOS at some point as a foray into these more complicated but "safer"/transactional/immutable/deterministic systems but I just haven't found the motivation yet.

m1n7 2y ago
i think it's possible to have both. we just haven't decided how to implement these improvements, that's why we see so many different immutable/snapshot/… distros with lacking ux — for now
struanr 2y ago
Personally I went from Arch to NixOS and now back to Arch. Whilst I can appreciate the power of NixOS it felt like such a huge amount of abstraction and secret sauce it made it impossible to fit in my head. In addition, the documentation and debugging experience of the Nix language were very poor. Nix shell was useful for trying out programs temporarily, however I found it a poor substitute for native Python and Julia package managers, especially for scientific work where a requirements.txt is useful to a lot more people than a flake.nix Going back to Arch has felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything is simple, easy to understand and incredibility well documented. Using a snapper pacman hook I can now revert my system to undo updates, which was the main functionality I found useful in NixOS.
- sandbach 2y ago
  It's worth noting that the benefits of Nix shell you mention can be enjoyed from the comfort of another distro with the Nix package manager.
leetnewb 2y ago

BossingAround 2y ago

Whenever SUSE is mentioned, I remember their songs, e.g. how to pronounce SUSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLdexZlVkAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLdexZlVkAY

fileeditview 2y ago
I mean the song is funny but it's hilarious that they still mispronounce it.. he constantly sings susAH instead of susEH .. how it should be pronounced, at least if you pronounce it as a German word.
- artificial 2y ago
  “Zooz-eh” for English speakers who are curious: https://translate.google.de/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=SUSE&op=translate https://translate.google.de/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=SUSE&op=tran...
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    the only guy I've ever known to correctly pronounce SUSE was an older fellow who was, towards the end of the 00s, pronouncing "Ethernet" with a short e, as though it were to rhyme with "meth" anyway, that's why I'll always call it Soos even if I know I'm wrong that guy probably also pronounced it "GIF" but it's been too long to say for sure
    - bear8642 2y ago
      >pronouncing "Ethernet" with a short e, as though it were to rhyme with "meth" Well it's a network across the ether (æther) right? :-D
moffkalast 2y ago
And I get reminded of amogus.

aitchnyu 2y ago

Has anybody tried Spiral and Gecko? Same developer adapted Debian Sid and Suse Tumbleweed with btrfs snapshot after each install. How did they/similar systems work in practice for you?

curt15 2y ago

Looks like it uses btrfs for everything. Btrfs performs notoriously poorly for VMs and databases without the "nocow" hack, which is a no-no for raid1 setups. What should I do if I'm an Android developer who frequently tests code in Android VMs?

Rinzler89 2y ago
Separate root and home partitions brother. As in, keep root on BTRFS for rollbacks and keep home on extf4 where you keep.all your dbs and VMs. This way you get best if both worlds, no need to mess with nocow parameters.

LorenDB 2y ago

There's also openSUSE Kalpa, which is like Aeon but with KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.

kombine 2y ago

Tumbleweed is a very solid distro, one could also use it as an "immutable" distro by installing the software from Flatpaks and distrobox. Been using it for more than a year after a decade on Ubuntu.

jacooper 2y ago
I found zyppet to be quite slow even compare to DNF which is notorious for being slow. Also it's not very well supported in the community, I guess distrobox fixes this.
JHonaker 2y ago
The fact that I can go months without updating a rolling distro and things very rarely break is incredible. Tumbleweed is rock solid. (Personally, I've never experienced a break, but I know one just happened for a lot of people. Granted, I believe it was Nvidia or Mesa drivers at fault.)

KolenCh 2y ago

I use OpenSUSE Leap with transactional server, which is another immutable distribution by SUSE. I run it on my storage node primarily serving a ZFS pool over the network. This means the server is more like an appliance (NAS) and this immutable setup is a perfect fit IMO. I suppose I could have use Aeon instead? But I like having OpenSUSE Leap across the fleet too which others doing more heavy lifting.