[HN Gopher] Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers
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Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers
Author : signa11
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-06-28 02:30 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| jmercouris wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But what that mean in practice? Every Linux distro promises
| they are the "works out of the box" one
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I am confused at the "for developer" bit. How does it
| different from, say, a lazy desktop for non-developer?
| stryan wrote:
| You only need to make your own packages if you're not already
| building containers, flatpaks, or RPM's, though RPMs are
| discouraged.
| type0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is SUSE still used by anyone other than SAP or other German
| businesses?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed as my main OS in recent years.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think they're talking about large
| corps/businesses/governments, not individual users
| theodric wrote:
| I rather think "anyone" includes all comers, not just
| corporations
| chefandy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hmm, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora seemed to do this fine on my
| system. No futzing required.
| woodson wrote:
| Yes, it should work just fine with mokutils.
| chefandy wrote:
| Yes- I didn't say exclusively, I said often. The bigger old
| distros are more likely to work.
| canpan wrote:
| I use it for similar reasons! But I do not have the pain
| point? For me secure boot just worked out of the box with
| Tumbleweed? Maybe old information? Nvidia official driver
| installation is a bit annoying. You need to add the nvidia
| repo. It is the same problem for other linux distros, like
| debian.
| kergonath wrote:
| > You need to add the nvidia repo.
|
| I think I get nVidia's drivers form one of the built in
| repositories. I still added nVidia's for the CUDA
| development stuff.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| The repo is official, but it's not installed by default.
| It's very easy to add as there's a package that adds it
| using the new services system, and zypper can auto-detect
| the correct packages for the hardware:
|
| zypper install openSUSE-repos-Leap-NVIDIA (or
| Tumbleweed/Slowroll)
|
| zypper install-new-recommends --repo repo-non-free
| chefandy wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure it's braindead simple if you regularly do
| systems stuff on Linux, like I used to. But not having
| done that for a while, I needed to a) find the info for
| the different ways to install the driver on this distro
| and figure out which one applies, b) figure out which
| specific driver version you need, c) install it and then
| figure out which of the few dozen other packages in that
| repository you need to install, d) manually blacklist the
| nouveau driver which it inexplicably still tries to load,
| e) reboot which automatically bookts into MOK utils which
| asks you for a password and seemingly doesn't accept
| anything you enter, f) figure out how to re-run MOK Utils
| on boot to enroll the module, g) futz around setting the
| MOK Utils password until you're about to throw your
| computer out the window, h) figure out that the utility
| doesn't work with non-querty keyboard layouts, i) have to
| re-enroll every time the driver updates.
|
| Sure, it might be simple as far as Linux administration
| tasks go, but I'm not using Linux because I like
| dickering around with Linux-- I need a POSIX system that
| supports my hardware to use as a professional tool.
| Regardless of whether or not it's a fair comparison, my
| comparison is to the experience with Windows and MacOS.
| It's not a judgement of the competence of the people that
| made it or the overall product quality-- it's apples to
| oranges. Unfortunately, it's Apples-to-Oranges for a lot
| of UX and QoL factors as well.
| kergonath wrote:
| I am not 100% certain because I did not pay _that much_
| attention but I am fairly confident that the nVidia repo
| was set up without me entering any command when I
| installed Tumbleweed on a new desktop 3 weeks ago.
| chefandy wrote:
| Wasn't for me, though there may have been some
| installation option that I didn't pay attention to.
| chefandy wrote:
| The process for using MOKutils to re-enroll the module key,
| requiring yet another password that I can't easily get from
| my password manager with every single driver update is a
| PITA. Maybe it's just that fragile on my system.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| I use tumbleweed. It's like Arch but without the blood. I need
| a bleeding edge distro that's preconfigured for sanity out of
| the box and just works. If you do too give it a go.
| __loam wrote:
| I've also used Tumbleweed after I had some problems with
| Arch. It's a very good distro but I ultimately switched to
| kubuntu she xubuntu because it was easier to install
| software.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| What do you mean by "it was easier"?
|
| I open Discover in KDE Tumbleweed, search for the SW I'm
| looking for, click Install, and then type my admin password
| to confirm. Don't even need to open the command line.
|
| What did you find difficult in that?
| __loam wrote:
| What I mean is that, when trying to find software for
| Linux, nearly everyone has an option available for Ubuntu
| and apt. The same isn't true for Tumbleweed
| unfortunately. You can fuck around with Fedora rpms when
| SUSE doesn't have an option but I had some issues with
| some software I use regularly. I still think Tumbleweed
| is an excellent distribution, I just find that installing
| the software I need is most frictionless on Ubuntu
| distributions.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Which software you didn't find on tumbleweed?
|
| Packages that aren't native to Tumbleweed are available
| in Discover as Flatpacks.
|
| You're probably trying to look for software "the Windows
| way" of downloading the sw from a website in which case
| you mostly see .debs and .rpms but that doesn't mean it's
| not available in the tumbleweed repos or Flatpacks if you
| search Discover.
|
| Niche stuff not available in the official repos or
| Flatpacks can be found in the OPI(similar to Arch AUR)
| where the proprietary codecs also are.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Same. I got annoyed with Canonical's user-unfriendly changed,
| tried Debian and found that packages were out of date. Tried
| Tumbleweed and never looked back. Actually it was their KDE
| Plasma that won me over, but the rolling release and built in
| snapshot features have been amazing.
| rlonstein wrote:
| Similar. Long time Leap user on a laptop moved to Tumbleweed
| and it's been good.
| powersnail wrote:
| Been using tumbleweed for my personal computer for years. Very
| solid.
| petre wrote:
| We use Leap and are very happy with it.
| djaouen wrote:
| My main OS was Tumbleweed until I recently switched to Guix
| System.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Yes, quite a few of the big SK and Japanese automotive
| companies do, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda among others from talking
| to a friend who works in that sector a year or two ago. Pretty
| certain Walmart and Lenovo work with SUSE as well.
| wtf77 wrote:
| tumbleweed here, rocking solid since last year (switched from
| MacOS)
| ValtteriL wrote:
| Finland's latest supercomputer Lumi runs SUSE.
| cpach wrote:
| Home Depot use Suse.
|
| https://www.suse.com/success/the_home_depot/
| kccqzy wrote:
| Tumbleweed is my main Linux distribution.
| kergonath wrote:
| I use it for (non-German) computational physics and various
| sciency stuff. It strikes a nice balance between stability and
| updates. It just gets out of the way and does not need
| babysitting. It's great.
|
| It works fine with the nVidia drivers without messing around
| too much, which is not something I can say about most
| distributions I tried.
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| > I use it for (non-German) computational physics and various
| sciency stuff. It strikes a nice balance between stability
| and updates. It just gets out of the way and does not need
| babysitting. It's great.
|
| This is true for most distros though, so when I people see
| that as the reasoning for using a niche distro, I always
| think the reason is more because they like using a niche
| distro.
| kergonath wrote:
| > This is true for most distros though
|
| Not with secure boot (which I forgot to mention but I have
| to enable). AFAIK today there is OpenSuse, Ubuntu and RHEL.
| Last time I checked (about a year ago) there was OpenSuse
| and that was it.
|
| > I always think the reason is more because they like using
| a niche distro.
|
| Not at all. First, OpenSuse is not really niche. I don't
| care about being edgy (or I would run something like Arch
| or Gentoo). It just is solid and works well. Again, it's
| the robustness-updates balance.
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| > Not with secure boot (which I forgot to mention but I
| have to enable). AFAIK today there is OpenSuse, Ubuntu
| and RHEL. Last time I checked (about a year ago) there
| was OpenSuse and that was it.
|
| They're all just using the same MS signed loader are they
| not? And even if not, you certainly can on any distro.
| Secure boot and linux isn't a problem that ties you to a
| specific distro.
|
| > Not at all. First, OpenSuse is not really niche.
|
| It sure is, especially if you're not German or even
| European.
|
| > It just is solid and works well.
|
| Right, but so do most distros. Computing has advanced a
| lot so stability is the norm, there isn't anything
| special about OpenSuse.
| pxc wrote:
| > niche distro
|
| By 'niche distro' do you just mean 'not Ubuntu or RHEL'?
| openSUSE is neither unconventional nor obscure.
| DEADMINCE wrote:
| > By 'niche distro' do you just mean 'not Ubuntu or
| RHEL'?
|
| Well, no, I specifically mean niche.
|
| > openSUSE is neither unconventional nor obscure.
|
| Outside of Europe it sure is.
| dgan wrote:
| I use tumbleweed for my main laptop. I am in no way associated
| with Germans.
|
| I switched from debian 3 years ago, and am still happy
| BossingAround wrote:
| It's the best bleeding edge distro. More stable than Arch,
| and rolling (unlike Fedora for which you have to a system
| upgrade every 6 months).
| avhception wrote:
| While I am a German and started out with SuSE many years ago, I
| then left for Gentoo and Fedora / CentOS / RockyLinux and
| didn't look back for more than 15 years. Recently I gave
| Tumbleweed a shot and was surprised how good it was. I have
| since started switching some of my machines over and have been
| recommending it to friends.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| It's very popular in HPC [1]. HPE Cray OS is SLES with HPE's
| additions.
|
| [1]: https://top500.org/statistics/list/
| p_l wrote:
| Rackable, which was the company wearing SGI skin for few
| years and which was acquired by HPE, shipped SLES as their
| standard solution, with RHEL as second option.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I am although I am on the fence. As a developer tumbleweed
| provides me with everything I need - new releases, new kernels,
| new packages, etc. Mind you I use Leap at work and I gotta say
| I am really disappointed. There are some new packages which I
| can only get running inside docker containers which is a huge
| pita. I might end up going back to fedora 10+ years after I
| decided I had had enough of it.
| sysrich wrote:
| In Aeon you can have a distrobox of whatever distro you like
|
| So it isn't a huge PITA to run Ubuntu or Fedora packages on
| Aeon
| BossingAround wrote:
| SUSE did $0.67B in 2022. It's a live and vibrant company that
| focuses on traditional Linux and its management. Though it has
| cloud & container offerings of course, I think SUSE's greatest
| strength is for people that want to use multiple Linux distros
| (Debian and Debian-likes, RH and RH-likes) and get support for
| all of them under one roof.
|
| I don't know which particular customers are using it, but given
| the revenue, there must be _a lot_ of SUSE systems in the
| corporate world.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Add to this equation, the rancher products
| BossingAround wrote:
| I would think that the container world is dominated by
| OpenShift, tailed by using plain K8s.
| theodric wrote:
| Me. 25 years on Debian, but couldn't get it to cooperate for my
| VFIO passthrough multi-workstation. Arch worked great until one
| day, a few days before I had to leave home for a couple months,
| I unwisely performed updates which broke everything so
| comprehensively that I couldn't get them fixed in time and
| ended up having to rely on cloud compute rather than my GPU.
| (This actually happened twice, but only once before travel.)
| I've been on Tumbleweed since. The one time it broke something,
| I rolled back the snapshot and continued what I was doing. The
| machine is an _appliance_ which is exactly what I need: the VMs
| are where the action is, and I don 't want to have to wonder if
| I will find out I can't use my CAD package or AI sandbox
| because the host broke again.
| type0 wrote:
| its fairly common in EU, my local grocery store uses SUSE on
| their customer self service terminals
| LorenDB wrote:
| Tumbleweed daily driver here, for both work and home use.
| bjoli wrote:
| I run aeon. Pretty happy with the experience so far.
| winrid wrote:
| 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
| brnt wrote:
| I _would_ like to know if they'd gonna make a KDE spin.
| Opensuse used to be all about KDE.
| johnny22 wrote:
| You don't to wonder, you can just look it up and find out
| that they did, right when they started this whole concept.
| brnt wrote:
| openSuse haven't made it easy. Turns out both are an option
| of the MicroOS installer. I'd not call that a separate
| distro, but it seems to have product pages like that.
| itsZero wrote:
| It's already here: openSUSE Kalpa. Daily driving it!
| sysrich wrote:
| I've never had that happen.. what password prompts are you
| referencing?
| winrid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've never had that happen to me either. Maybe it was just
| due to some Pop COSMIC extension
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Feels like a step backwards that I have to reboot the system for
| every update.
| BossingAround wrote:
| The same applies on Steam Deck. This is a thing with immutable
| systems.
| sysrich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-
| tpm2-...
| billyzs wrote:
| if kernel is updated the OS would have to be rebooted anyway
| unless live patching is configured. Rebooting after an update
| is probably more common & less annoying than one would think.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Which update? The design of the system is so that there's
| minimal things installed that require a layer update.
| bjoli wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...)
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| theodric wrote:
| What's the benefit to a traditional consumer application of
| opening ports these days, besides maybe for local network
| data exchange (which, I assume, is what Steam does since I
| know it will sync game updates between machines on the same
| subnet). I would hazard that the global number of laptops
| and desktops with public IPv4 addresses in 2024 is probably
| in the triple digits, given that basically every provider
| I'm aware of hands off with a "Wi-Fi modem" that converts
| whatever weird delivery medium (fiber, DSL, cable, etc.),
| gets its own maybe-public IP, and does NAT for clients.
| Hell, I don't even have my own IPv4 address since Starlink
| does CGNAT.
| throwaway89988 wrote:
| The base system does not need a Firewall, according to them,
| and they might be correct about that or not.
|
| IMHO the point of having a firewall which simply denies all
| incoming connections is, that once a user starts installing a
| few programs, sooner or later some of them might open ports,
| even w/o malicious intent.
|
| If they want to provide an easy to use and secure system,
| IMHO there should be a firewall and each port has to be
| opened explicitly.
|
| In the end, this is really down to opinion and there is no
| objective true answer, so I'd rather use Fedora-Atomic if I
| need immutability.
| BossingAround wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, and I understand the
| maintainer's POV. But, nothing prevents you from installing
| firewalld, right? It should just work.
| deknos wrote:
| i agree with the flatpak, sadly this will probably not change.
|
| BUT! if you are a developer, you could run with distrobox
| graphically applications from the distrobox from OpenSUSE!
|
| I am starting to use this on tumbleweed and there are even
| "exporters" so the app in the distrobox will be exported to
| your application menu on the metal!
| thoroughburro wrote:
| I use a MicroOS + wayland + sway and friends setup, since I
| don't like big DEs. I completely agree with you about needing a
| firewall, but it was an easy fix to continue taking advantage
| of all the good parts: sudo transactional-
| update shell zypper in firewalld [setup as you
| like] exit sudo reboot
|
| Now you have MicroOS or Aeon as you like it. It's a discouraged
| practice, but if you stick to the default repos and well-used
| packages, you can definitely tweak the opinionated defaults
| without compromising the vision.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Whenever SUSE is mentioned, I remember their songs, e.g. how to
| pronounce SUSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLdexZlVkAY
| fileeditview wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Zooz-eh" for English speakers who are curious: https://trans
| late.google.de/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=SUSE&op=tran...
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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
| moffkalast wrote:
| And I get reminded of amogus.
| jpgvm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| To be fair, Tumbleweed has had snapshot/rollback built in and
| generally triggered at important points for years. There are
| exceedingly few scenarios where you can't just move to the
| prior snapshot to get a working system again - talking a minute
| after failure. Aeon takes it further, but that's where it
| started. Hard to argue the speed of repairing by rollback vs
| reinstall.
|
| Also, Aeon has first party support for running cli and gui
| things in distrobox. You can pull down an OCI container of
| virtually any distro and do whatever you want in it. Distrobox
| lets you expose applications from the container environment to
| the Aeon desktop.
|
| Hypothetically, you could use Aeon as your rock solid core and
| tinker in distroboxes, including refining the install script to
| making a custom OCI container. Not trying to convince you -
| just saying there is a lot of easy to access flexibility there.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Yeah I should give Tumbleweed a try at some point.
|
| It's hard to give up the Arch PKGBUILD system though, it's an
| even simpler ebuild which was originally why I loved Gentoo
| so much.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| I'm always puzzled how folks praise PKGBUILDs when it's
| mostly irrelevant for a regular user. Unless by 'PKGBUILD
| system' you mean AUR, a place where _random_ people push
| _random_ build scripts and other folks are happy to execute
| said build scripts locally, quite often without any real
| sandboxing or even a quick glance at the actual code.
| Avshalom wrote:
| what do you think "a regular user" of
| ubuntu/suse/fedora/arch/etc. looks like?
|
| back when I was using arch I wrote pkgbuilds instead of
| configure/make/installing to my home folder. kept my
| ./local/(bin|lib|share) clean and meant I could update it
| easier or uninstall it with pacman.
|
| As to runnning random build scripts, well I already do
| that anyway. Any software that isn't provided by my
| package manager requires me to run _random_ build scripts
| from _random_ people. I sure as hell am not reading
| through every line of code in say... trealla prolog
| before make-ing it.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| > back when I was using arch I wrote pkgbuilds instead of
| configure/make/installing to my home folder. kept my
| ./local/(bin|lib|share) clean and meant I could update it
| easier or uninstall it with pacman.
|
| This is exactly what a tech savvy user would do.
| Avshalom wrote:
| yeah, and the number of people who use a non-android
| linux and aren't "tech savvy" rounds to zero. It is very
| weird to ask "what's in it for the regular user" with the
| assumption that "the regular user of e.g. SUSE" is the
| same as "the regular user of a computer"
| qludes wrote:
| An immutable rootfs distro should be a bit more resilient
| than the average Linux install. Not having to add any
| random repos to your base system is a great feature. When
| I run random build scripts I mostly use containers or
| VMs, that also works for the odd unmaintained but useful
| software that requires vintage Ubuntu LTS libraries.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'll take AUR over random blog articles telling me to add
| some obscure deb repository to my Debian/Ubuntu sources.
| At least AUR gives an accepted process to submitting and
| maintaining these third party packages. You can leave
| comments and read comments by others on a particular
| package. You can check the PKGBUILD which exists for
| every package and can be accessed in the same way for
| every package. And I do check every single PKGBUILD
| before installing some random package. AUR provides
| infrastructure and processes. It centralises the whole
| idea of "third party packages". Not having AUR just means
| everybody has their own repos for particular programs and
| no way for users to communicate in an easy and accessible
| way, which I think is pure insanity.
|
| Honestly, I think AUR is one of the best things to ever
| come out of Linux, because it's not just a repository.
| Arnavion wrote:
| You act like the choice is either having a small official
| repo plus PPAs or a small official repo plus AUR, when
| the context of this thread is a comparison is with
| OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which has a large official repo (plus
| PPAs in the form of other OBS repositories if you really
| need them, but you almost certainly don't). A large
| amount of software that an Arch user has to use the AUR
| for is in the OpenSUSE oss repo that is supported
| officially and "tested" when snapshots are released
| (though the amount of testing varies with the software,
| of course).
| jpgvm wrote:
| Well, just because it's not relevant to a regular user
| doesn't mean it's not relevant to me and people like me.
|
| The regular user only installs software others have
| packaged.
|
| I end up packaging software sometimes (maintain a few AUR
| packages) but my main use-case is being able to modify
| the packaging myself for private use, generally to apply
| custom patches or alter compiler flags etc.
|
| Being able to do all of this easily without ending up
| with a pile of goop everywhere from `git clone thing &&
| cd thing && make && sudo make install` is nice.
| lye wrote:
| They're not more "random" than developers of a lot of
| software you run. Package quality tends to be pretty
| good, I've only seen doubtful things once or twice in
| about a decade, and nothing malicious. Definitely haven't
| seen anything like the famous `rm -rf /*` in the official
| non-"random" nvidia package that was prepared and then
| shat into the world by nvidia's non-"random" developers.
| rcxdude wrote:
| They're the most accessable packaging building system, is
| why. If you're ever actually trying to install something
| (properly, i.e. not making a mess by just splattering
| files across the filesystem with 'make install') that
| isn't already packaged, you're going to have the easiest
| time with PKGBUILDs (basically, if you can figure out how
| to compile the software using the instructions for that,
| you can make a PKGBUILD. The same is not true for other
| package managers). So they're praised by power users who
| can manage that and by developers who don't want to learn
| a harder to use packaging system.
| qludes wrote:
| With Tumbleweed (and probably Aeon) you can use
| factory/open build service to build your own packages. You
| could even fork Aeon or MicroOS and turn to that into
| something like a customized Arch Install that also benefits
| from whatever automated tests Tumbleweed comes with.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I never understood the point of rollback. Suppose you run
| some upgrade and hit a bug that prevents boot. Okey, you
| revert, so you can keep running your outdated system. Now
| what?
|
| It's not like whichever broke your upgrade is going to
| disappear if you simply try again.
| Arnavion wrote:
| You report the bug and wait for it to be fixed, and
| meanwhile you have a working computer and can get on with
| what you originally wanted to use your computer for.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| How are you even going to diagnose it? You just rolled
| back .
|
| And what was the reason you were even upgrading in the
| first place? Likely precisely because you needed the
| upgrade in order to "get on with what you originally
| wanted to use your computer for" ?
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| I use opensuse leap 15.3 and it just works. No fiddling around
| and install takes 15 minutes.
|
| Then I have a home cooked backup script that runs daily to a
| remote server, so in a worst case situation, I reinstall, 15
| minutes, and then copy my dot files and other stuff which might
| take another 5-15 minutes.
|
| So for single person use, or small environments of 20-30
| servers or so, the traditional old model works well.
| bboozzoo wrote:
| FYI, in case you missed that, Leap has been EOL since late
| 2022.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Leap 15.6 was released on the 12th of this month.
|
| https://news.opensuse.org/2024/06/12/leap-unveils-choices-
| fo...
|
| It might be the last OpenSUSE using the traditional release
| model, but it's not EOL.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I think they meant to say specifically Leap 15.3
| doubled112 wrote:
| Definitely possible, but there was considerable talk
| about the end of Leap. Thought it was still worth
| mentioning.
| fao_ wrote:
| > 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 mean, that's the point. If the configuration of the machine
| is declarative it's easier to replace it with a duplicate that
| works. Declarative in this context literally just means "the
| entire state is declared in a way that you can roll it back"
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Nixos is pretty slick for servers. Everything from users to
| nginx to system services to firewall is defined declaratively
| in 1-5 files, and deployment is as simple as `nixos-rebuild
| switch ---target-host deploy@host`.
|
| For me that's pretty wild. It makes it trivial to have both
| staging and prod in sync by just pushing to a repo. That means
| you get a better overview of the system state, and can
| experiment more freely knowing the machine won't end up in a
| weird state. And while Nixos is hard to debug and occasionally
| hard to write, I find the format very easy to read.
|
| However for my personal computer, I found that it's overkill
| and now I just use a dotfile manager and save my installed
| program names in a list. I do think nix really lacks
| documentation for very basic things, and for that guix is
| better (but I found guix harder to write and read).
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| I was in similar situation. Arch user that bought the sell from
| NixOS. It worked great after a painstaking setup (everything
| you think you know about Linux systems in general is wrong!)
| and was a joy to use but when it broke, it was a complete mess
| due to how quirky the whole OS is. P.S There's nothing simple
| about NixOS and the documentation could use some work.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's also openSUSE Kalpa, which is like Aeon but with KDE
| Plasma instead of Gnome.
| kombine wrote:
| 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.
| JHonaker wrote:
| 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.)
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