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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Thanks for the detailed response! I'll definitely need to take a look at fedoras atomic distros myself. Seems like they are well put together. Just to clarify though what do you mean by configuration drift?
I used Aeon from RC2 to RC3 iirc. Until the introduction of encrypted drives mashed my system and i suddenly had secure boot key problems or something. It was a year ago so I can’t remember exactly, but it worked beautifully until then.
So I moved on. But Aeon is really good, probably the best immutable desktop experience, if you can stomach GNOME as a daily driver (I couldn’t wait to jump back to plasma after I lost my Aeon setup). Richard Brown is opinionated but generally sensible about its development too.
I haven’t kept up with Kalpa development since last year, but the last I tried it was the same problem it’s always had; lack of development. It’s was years behind Aeon then and unless things have changed it’ll have likely gotten worse. The problems being that Rich Brown has great development and contributors to Aeon, while Mr Falken does not with Kalpa (or did not! Hopefully he has gotten some traction with it).
Good write up here as well from around that time. I haven’t had a chance to check out the article you linked though. https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-relate/
Appreciate the response! Too bad about Kalpa but hopefully it's managed to gather some contributors and turn things around. Definitely considering giving Aeon another go as well on a laptop or something. I am a GNOME user already and it seems like a solid option for something that just works.
I've been using Aeon since March or so this year, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I don't know if it's my old hardware (AMD 3500U from ~2017), or if it's a more common experience, but I've had to mess with the recovery key about 5 times (which is a super long, random key that i have to type from a picture), which is ridiculous IMO. Some updates trigger an SELinux check, which locks up boot for something like 10 minutes when it triggers, and given my use of my machine, I have to sit through it. That sucks.
I'm still using it on my laptop, but I'm not going to switch my Tumbleweed desktop to it because there has been just enough friction to bother me and I'd end up breaking the whole point of the system to fix it (e.g. I dislike bash as the default shell, distro-enter doesn't do some important things, etc).
If the encryption key thing is just my hardware, I think it's fine for most people. But if it's as common as it was for me, I can only recommend it to power users, and those would be better off with Tumbleweed anyway.
So yeah, I think it's a cool idea, but it needs something to help ease the friction of working with it.
Not shocked at the issues. The review I mention at the top of the post has some similar lockups upon boot. I am a TW desktop user as well and am planning on keeping it that way, but I'll definitely give Aeon a go on a laptop and see if it has the same issues you mentioned or whether it's a more a hardware issue. Thanks for sharing your experiences!
Yeah, no worries! I like the idea of Aeon, I just had some trouble with it. I'll see how the next few months go.