Since around the pandemic, I have been using Arch Linux and KDE Plasma full time and had become completely enamored with it and familiar with the commands and settings. It made it super easy to install almost any app available using Yay or Paru for example to take advantage of the AUR library. I dabbled a bit here and there with other variations of Arch such as ZENArch (Uses the Zen Kernel) and others, my step daughter’s PC has EndeavourOS on it. When the immutable craze came out a couple of years back, I tried BlendOS, which was designed to be immutable but found it to be too rough around the edges. I even played around with NixOS a tiny bit and OpenSuse Tumbleweed, which was just is too enterprise centric for me, even though it is for both home and enterprise users. It even seemed a bit slower than Arch as well.
Last week or two sometime, another user posted about a new OS for distrohopping and someone mentioned Aurora Linux which piqued my curiosity. On the 28th of December '24 I took the leap and replaced Arch with Aurora DX (Developer edition), which contains more tools that I use such as VSCode and Docker and other items of that nature by design. I was a bit thrown off with their extended install time where it seemed to be frozen, but I let it process and took a nice coffee break as it were. :) Once the install finished, I rebooted and found my way through the update process and have enjoyed the structure of it and it offers a rolling release which I’m used to for the software. I enabled the auto updater which has made it enjoyable and I don’t even realize things have updated to be honest since it’s transparently done. Today sometime, KDE released 6.2.4 and within hours my KDE updated to that version. Color me impressed! Yes, Arch could do that as well, but and I often dabbled in their unstable repo’s just so I could get the latest Plasma Desktop, which would sometimes take longer than anticipated. I ran into a lot of instability and started to have more issues than I cared for. Yes, I know - that comes with the territory of alpha software and I accepted it! I freely admit too, I became sort of hooked on running the “Yay” command to update my system daily if not multiple times, it was addicting to see the software releases come in.
One of the things about Aurora Linux is it includes “BoxBuddy” which in itself is nothing short of amazing. It tightly integrates various OS’s into the terminal where you can install apps which are not found in the os-tree or RPM repositories. This morning, I needed to install scrcpy so I could type through my phone in a chat with a business, and the flatpak version of GUIScrpy refused to see my phone so I tried to install scrcpy but it could not be found. I then fired up an Arch install and installed ‘scrcpy’ which is really all I wanted and was on my way. Having the ability to graphically run apps, inside of the OS of your choice natively has been nothing short of impressive! While scrpy is not graphical, For testing purposes, I installed “Glabel” which is a Gnome label program and it acted and looked just like it was native to my OS. (There is a flatpak version I installed for the Aurora Linux) which I’m using now for my label printer.
AuroraLinux-DX at least includes kubernetes, podman and docker pre-installed with a desktop management tool for both which is quite nice. I don’t really run Docker on my desktop, but this may change. :) (I run Docker on a separate server).
So far, I can honestly say, my system feels quite stable and have not encountered any crashes or issues which have hindered me from staying with it.
That was a great read. Wonderfully detailed. Thank you!
It’s a pity that it went down like that. Would you say that a properly matured openSUSE Kalpa would be your perfect setup? Out of curiosity, have you used projects related to Fedora Atomic for long periods of time? If so, how would you compare them?
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.
Thanks a ton for the elaborate answer!
Hmm…, I’m aware that the AppImage situation is pretty dire since it requires FUSE 2 libs while everyone and their grandmothers have moved to FUSE 3; software that’s been almost out for a decade now. Thankfully, I’ve never actually experienced trouble getting it to work on any distro. Sure, installing some libs was often required, but nothing too fancy.
FWIW, I’m 100% positive that you could get it to work on Aeon. IIRC, I’ve also used AppImages through distrobox containers.
Interesting. If it isn’t too much of a trouble, could you pitch Openbox :P for me? I’m not too familiar with it, but you did get me curious.
Put into my backlog of stuff I’ve got to checkout.
It’s nothing special, it’s just what I like. I learned Linux using fluxbox, and later moved to Openbox because it was more feature complete. It’s a window manager, stacking-style, mouse-centric unlike Sway, i3, Hyprland, dwm etc.
All config is done through a handwritten xml, but there exist gui tools to help edit/write all or parts of this for you.
No panel by default, so you’ll need to find your own. You just right-click the desktop and you get a menu.
It’s called a pipe menu, and it’s been nearly 20 years since I learned about it so I’ll do my best to remember how it works. The pipe menu dynamically changes as bash scripts are activated on mouse movement. So pointing at one thing in the menu would activate a script which triggers the next part of the menu to appear.
The hook is that openbox and fluxbox are very fast and use very little system resources.
Openbox is considered to be bug-free and hasn’t had any commits in nearly 10 years I believe. I think openbox is still being used in the lxqt suite, so maybe the default for Lubuntu? (if that’s still a thing!)