Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> I just haven't found the motivation yet.

I moved from Arch to NixOS. In case it helps these are my main motivations:

* In Arch, very rarely, I'd apply an update that would break things. Going back to a stable system was a pain. I ended up with some snapper setups and a list of commands to convert the latest snapshot to a r/w 'root' that worked well enough. With NixOS I just reboot to the previous generation on any issue.

* For development I'd often use third-party tools to manage multiple language versions. For example I used pyenv. With Nix it's much easier to just use python39, or nodejs-18_x, or whatever as Nix makes this really simple.

If you do decide to try it out I'll recommend using the github query 'path:*.nix ___' to copy off others, as the main complaints about Nix seem to center around the language.

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

> 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"

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.

And I get reminded of amogus.

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

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.

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!

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.

I _would_ like to know if they'd gonna make a KDE spin. Opensuse used to be all about KDE.

I’ve never had that happen.. what password prompts are you referencing?

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.

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.)

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.

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

Which update? The design of the system is so that there's minimal things installed that require a layer update.

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.

The same applies on Steam Deck. This is a thing with immutable systems.