openSUSE Aeon - Desktop Linux finally done right?

openSUSE Aeon (formerly MicroOS Desktop) aims to be a fully fledged modern Linux Desktop leveraging as many of the latest user space innovations available including:

- Immutable OS with Transactional Updates
- Secure Boot
- TPM Encryption
- Flatpaks & OCI containers as primary application delivery

This talk will introduce the distribution, highlight the adoption of some of the latest foundational user space technologies as well as share some of the pain points being faced and invite the audience to contribute to this exciting platform.

Richard Brown

#asg2023

[lzcoder]

Aeon is a master piece, using the development version and its pretty stable, just works. Auto updates, rollback, flathub, distrobox and Gnome, all i need 💚.

[aduplat]

Thank you. I am using AEON, and I am very happy with it. I am a humanities instructor, and I like to have a machine that requires minimum effort to get the work done every day.

[unclefester]

Always liked OpenSUSE. I like the concept of immutability and roll back

[BRFan]

I love this distro! I did a hardening test with lynis and got a hardening score of 87 out of the box. I took a little time to get used to the new commands. I now am enjoyingthe heck out of this distro, , Thanks for the hard work

[UPPERKEES]

Awesome to hear about a mechanism to detect deviations from the base image release. This is so super useful on Silverblue with rpm-ostree.

[Rerum]

Love the talk, always cool to see unique ways of using a desktop. I think this is perfect for those who just need to get work done, are those who are not technically savvy.

[unclefester]

Fails install in a virtual environment ? Why How to fix this

[michaelmcdonald]

How does one go if they have multiple users and filling up disk storage because instead of system wide flatpaks by default, it's user wide and so all users have their own flatpak installations even the same ones?

[VicharB]

Have been SuSE/Opensuse user since version 7.x, as my primary OS, Tumbleweed being my choice since nearly its early days.; as of today I am running it on my latest bought Elitebook 835 G10 7840U/32GB/Samsung 990 Pro 2TB and all is working out of box, including ambient light sensor, wifi, bluetooth, fingerprint scanner, etc ... 100%.
Will definitely give a try to MicroOS/Aeon, but then I a KDE guy! Thanks to the Team for this awesome OS/platform/distro ... Thumbs Up!

[barriewood]

Micro OS and Fedora Silverblue deployed across my half dozen PCs / laptops.

MicroOS being daily driven even before first full release. It is that good.

Only my occasionally used M1 not running either of these immutable OS’ - the older Intel MacBook Pro runs Aeon superbly!

So many casual users (normies) and those with need for reliability (devs /sys ad) will welcome immutable set and forget devices.

[replikvltyoutube]

I'm so glad MicroOS made standalone install possible without those rhel coreos ignition requirements

[mehmeticin]

very logical and reasonable and pivotal moment for linux desktop. Linux desktop should be like Aeon, and get rid of competing with useless MacOS and Windows catchup .. there is nothing to be caught up in others . this is the stratagy sooner or later that will work.

[sergiovelasquezzeballos]

I'm keeping Tumbleweed, but thank you for all this work, it's great.

[JaminFernandez]

Yes, i user for open suse aeon and its amazing

[ericodionneviglione]

I want to move away from my Win10 to openSUSE. All I use is Atlantis word processor, VLC player, and the Chrome browser. Should I choose openSUSE Aeon over openSUSE Tumbleweed? Thanks. :)

[benjy]

The main problems I see is you have to use btrfs, which isn't the fastest filesystem, especially on slower computers, and it only supports gnome, which sucks, I believe there's an alpha kde version too, but that's only 2 desktops, if you want something similar but with way more freedom then I recommend nixos, you can use any filesystem, you can use any desktop or window manager, and from what I can see you get similar functionality in terms of when you update it doesn't overwrite your current system, it installs the updated software alongside it, so then if an update breaks something you can just reboot into your previous working system.

[natalie]

I think making it single user makes a lot of sense. I don't have any data on this but I assume most linux users don't let anyone else use their laptop or desktop, and for those who do there's plenty of multi user distros.

[tehehe]

As far as servers go why not make pxe bootable distro that doesn't install itself to disk? It boots over network and it ready to rock. Updates are reboot away same with rollbacks. Operating system becomes like kubernetes pod: immutable and stateless. As a bonus disks can be used for actually useful stuff.

[NormanF]

The initial build was garbage when it first came out…no Internet connection and it was a mess as a desktop. A few years later, Kalpa is much improved and everything now works, including the Internet! 😊

[richardbennett]

One usually pronounces the -ae- in words like archaeology, aetiology, haemoglobin, dyslipidaemia, daemon, and aeon (think "Americanized" spellings: etiology, hemoglobin, dyslipidemia, demon, and eon) are all pronounced USUALLY with a long E vowel sound, not so much like how this presenter is pronouncing "aeon." Hmm.

It just is so funny to hear people pronouncing daemon as DAYmun, when it is the old ash (ae) letter that is pronounced today as DEEmun EVEN if it is still spelled daemon.
From Wikipedia: "Æ (lowercase: æ) is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel (the sound represented by the 'a' in English words like cat)."