My only experience with a Fedora-based distro at all has been Bazzite that I had on a htpc for about 12 months, and the use case doesn’t really let me compare to Aeon. Similar to Aeon though, I had no problems with it during that time.

I had Aurora on a thumbstick because I wanted to try it, but never got around to it.

I was hoping something would happen with Kalpa, but I don’t believe anything will. I think if it was ever there, that with be best for me. I’ve moved to cachy OS mainly because I needed to get certain things working that were only packaged in appimage- BUT I believe I could have worked it out in Aeon by fiddling around with distrobox. I was going to test out Aurora for this and just stumbled into cachy OS instead.

I’m not sure if I would go back to Aeon now, as I’m back on KDE again I don’t think I want to look at gnome for a while.

But for my tastes, I think once there is a mature wayland-based Openbox replacement (eyes on labwc) I’d look around to see which distro works best with that. I’d imagine it could be Tumbleweed but I’d also watch how well it works on something extremely stable maybe Debian-based.

Nothing is getting me really excited about Linux right now, not the way Ubuntu did in the 2000s, or how Crunchbang did, and not the way Tumbleweed did. Which is probably for the best because I don’t have time for tinkering or system maintenance, and that’s what makes the immutable distros shine.

I used Aeon myself from it being called microOS Desktop Gnome until around August of this year, it had replaced my old Tumbleweed install, and it had been rock solid the entire time. Absolutely loved it.

It was everything I needed up to that point - wayland, automated updates and rollback, the default packages were spot on and super light, network config perfect out of the box (something I always struggle with), flatpak first! I’m a KDE user (well I’m really an Openbox guy but no wayland solution yet), so I suffered gnome for the sake of having a great system. I really like what Richard Brown has achieved, it’s almost perfect.

You suspect right, my partner is not a tech user - Firefox, steam, libre office is pretty much it for her. When she shut down the night before this she had just been uploading photos to her cloud storage.

I believe it was related to the implementation of full disk encryption. As this happened immediately after that policy was changed.

after the ASUS UEFI splash screen; the screen goes black, it flashes up ‘Random seed file is too short’.

Then it goes to a prompt:

'Please enter recovery key for disk root-x86-64 (aeon_root): (press tab for no echo)

I found the recovery key in my inbox, and in my partners sent files, as we knew it was probably important so she sent me a copy during installation. But when I put in the recovery key, let it go through the motions, it would restart and come back to this prompt. No amount of retrying the recovery key helped.

I posted the error on the Aeon subreddit but after the recovery key wouldn’t work I just walked away from it. I couldn’t find any other mentions of this error anywhere, and the death of search engines has made this kind of thing difficult to chase down.

With everything going on in our life I couldn’t troubleshoot this, I just needed her system up and I had Aurora ready on a thumbstick already.

It’s not mirror selection, it’s just not optimal compared to what Pacman is doing with parallel downloads.

Downloading hundreds of tiny libxcxcxc.so one-by-one is painful. Since switching to pacman, I watch it download these, doing 10 packages at a time. 10 packages in 1 second versus zypper doing similarly sized 10 packages in ~10-15 seconds.

I don’t need the mirror to be faster, I need zypper to handle more than one of these thousands of files at a time. Downloading a 100kb file at 15mb/s is no good to me when it’s stopping and starting 800 of them sequentially.

And I only see the conversation go around in circles especially on zypper’s github.

I can’t say much because I don’t use it, but I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

Her use case is simple- immutable, hassle free updates, and some games.

She has no problems with it so far.

I used it a little bit to back up an old hard drive, it’s just what I expected, a simple KDE implementation that isn’t messing about.

But what I really hope it will be is no random breaking that takes the entire system out, (and to be fair to Aeon in that case - Aeon is still in release candidate).

I’ve been using it a few months and it’s been reliable. But in my mind, my use case, cachyos or endeavour could be interchangeable. I picked cachyos by chance because I was looking at Phoronix and they had just benchmarked it.

I hadn’t used an Arch system since 2009 (except a brief stint with Manjaro around 2018 that ended in absolute disaster after about 2 weeks), so I was a bit skeptical about it.

I like the default browser is pretty much a hardened Firefox. Good boot times. The packages I need were all there. It was easy to setup snapper. The little aesthetic changes cachyos made are nicely done.

I’ve got a problem with port forwarding I can’t get working, never had that problem before and I don’t know network stuff well enough to figure it out.

The updates are the winner for me- I don’t know how long this has been a thing with arch but downloading multiple packages at the same time. Game changer. I love Tumbleweed, but a 2gb “zypper dup” downloading package by package could take me 30 - 60 minutes.

I mostly use flatpak, but I also needed to make use of some appimages and only 3 or 4 things I needed to install as system packages. So my Aeon install wasn’t working out for that and I wasn’t prepared to go back to tumbleweed.

Around 2012-2014 it was common to have Conky print things like system information or keyboard shortcuts in the desktop.

I think Conky is still around although less popular now. You could look into that though.

This is just an example from an image search for Conky desktop, but it gives you an idea how information can be displayed https://live.staticflickr.com/4062/4543953032_e6d7473206.jpg

Void is one I’ve often thought I’d like to try if I had time to dig into it.

Flatpak solves some of these. It would allow newer software on Debian. They’re packaged with codecs, so you don’t need to bother with Packman on Tumbleweed.

Roblox will not work. The developers are actively preventing it from working in Linux.

Those other games should. If you don’t mind to tinker a bit to make sure they’re set up properly, then your son should be able to just launch them from Bottles or Lutris or whatever you set up as a games launcher.

I don’t know about Sims. I have a pirated copy of Sims 3 working just fine though.

Tumbleweed was my favourite for years. I’m not currently using it, but I’ll always have a fondness for it.

I thought everything in the archive was still in read only mode?

I’ll keep it in mind when I try again. Thanks mate.

In trying to get Linux on my og Surface Go lately, it’s not easy or straightforward.

Maybe if you use Proton VPN on KDE it could need to pull in some Gnome packages. Which isn’t a problem. I use Proton VPN on KDE but I just install it from flathub to keep it simple, so I couldn’t say for sure.

I was confused, but I think they might be asking why Veracrypt isn’t available as a flatpak

Automatic updates are there with the right distro. Which highlights the need to look around for the right distro for the use case.

Example being Opensuse Aeon - automatic updates - doesn’t even tell you it’s happening, just pops up “your system was updated” out of nowhere

Automatic rollback - if an update broke something you would never know, at boot the system will pick the previous snapshot with no user intervention

As far as the user is concerned you just have a working system; that it is the entire goal of that distro

I didn’t know systemd-boot loader could boot snapshots. Do you know if there’s a guide to set this up?

I’m not using tumbleweed anymore for a few reasons, but my system does have snapper taking snapshots, and I’m using systemd-boot loader instead of grub. But I don’t know how to make those work together.

I tried it for a while, but downloads kept stalling and I’d come back hours later to find a corrupt file.

I’ve used other download tools with aria2 as a backend and didn’t have any issues.