As the title and the website say, I’m currently making a distro with the goal that you don’t have to compromise between ease of use + safety and bleeding-edge + performance optimizations.
As I will likely be able to publish the 0.0.1 source code to the GitHub link and the ISO to the website sometime next week, I would like people to be aware of my project so I can have some feedback for further improvements when I release the first version. I have not posted this anywhere else yet, as I value the opinion of this community more than Reddit or whatever.
If you have any questions or any criticism, please voice it, I would love to hear it, good or bad, in the end I want to make a proper OS. (I’ll go to bed now so expect replies to take a few hours from posting.)
Not personally interested,but a big question with something like this is how much time you have and how do you plan to maintain it in the long term? Don’t want to dissuade you, but I really don’t know if we need yet another distribution based on arch.
This is very cool! I like the idea of atomic distros although I haven’t really gotten into them much, if you keep on working on this project I might join it.
Question: I’m a bit confused about the package management system you talked about. Flatpaks for user level packages? What about the official arch repo and the AUR? I know other atomic distro’s don’t really work with traditional package managers, what does this mean for Pu-239? If there’s no AUR then there is no Arch Linux at least for me.
Also that name could probably do with some work lol. Maybe work on a shorthand way of spelling it and a better way to pronounce it? I’m not sure.
Thank you a lot for your interest! So as I pointed out in the other comments, out of the box and for the 0.0.1 release it’s intended to keep the system itself atomically updated through pacman and the user is advised to use flatpaks to install his applications. This is the most user friendly way of going about it, however I’m absolutely on your side and wouldn’t use it that way myself. 0.0.2 will have a way to “unlock” it so you can use the distro like vanilla Arch BUT you get peace of mind from knowing that you have a failsafe way of knowing the system will not break.
For the name, I did want Arch-Atomic at first but noticed this would violate the Arch Linux trademark policy and just went with my favorite isotope as a placeholder that unfortunately grew onto me. I will get off the couch now and edit the website so it’s apparent that Pu-239 is just the shorthand and people will refer to it as Plutonium-239 or just plain Plutonium in the future!
That’s an interesting idea, but if you make Arch’s root read only you’re leaving behind pacman/AUR (and to a good extent the Arch wiki) which are usually the main advantages of Arch based distros.
SteamOS solves the stability issue by providing runtimes for games, I didn’t read anything there about anything similar on your distro. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you’re not solving the stability issue, or in other words you will still be unstable as this will be a rolling release. In short I don’t see what would be the advantage of this over base Arch + Snapper (or timeshift).
In that regard, how is this different from Bazzite? I know it will be a different kernel and package versions but in principle the philosophy seems to be exactly the same, and I don’t expect the kernel/packages to be that different either.
Why github and not https://codeberg.org/?
Man, good question, I’m still torn about this. Initially I was forced to use GitHub specifically from my university, now it kind of stuck. I haven’t pushed much yet anyway so I might even make the switch.
Well, you could use Github’s free (as in beer) infrastructure to host artifacts, which means they’ll have to pay (as a company) instead of codeberg (as a non-profit). The issues and development can be hosted on codeberg. Kind of like how the Linux Kernel does it, Github only being a mirror, not an endorsement.
Hmm, I will definitely take your suggestion to heart. For now I’ll focus on actually getting the first ISO ready to be rolled out, after that I’ll take a deeper look into it, thank you!
I love the idea, apart from “user applications are flatpaks”. I’d love to install non flatpak applications.
Plus points for my perceived lack of AI sloppiness.
I do plan to have a way too “unlock” it so you can for example enter a console command to be able to install packages like vanilla Arch but they still get applied atomically. I dislike Flatpaks myself so for me to use it on my main workstation, I’d have to be able to never touch a flatpak as well haha. For the average user that wants a “just works” distro like SteamOS but also some of the speed-up from CachyOS, Flatpaks seem like the most intuitive decision however.
Sounds great and exactly how I’d want it! So you basically have a base set of packages which are guaranteed to be stable, but you can still layer stuff on top?
Maybe you can also have multiple boot entries like a “safe mode” or a way to boot different combinations of packages.
I’d really like to have a somewhat declarative way to manage the software on my laptop and desktop both, the latter being a superset as I need gaming and LLM related software there (which I don’t need on my laptop).
I’ll certainly play around with your distro as soon as it’s out. Don’t know when though, as I need to take a few precautions to not fuck up my data first 😅
Currently you can select either KDE Plasma or Gnome in the calamares installer and other than that it just slaps Intel and AMD CPU firmware on it along with Intel, AMD and NVIDIA drivers so yeah, a boated but working list of packages. I thought about making a quick tick-box solution but decided to just make it work right in the first place and get a proper hardware-detection going. The first version will be shipped with just that, for 0.0.2 to be released, I want it to have that kind of developer access where you can add or remove the packages you want, just like on a pre-configured Arch distro. That’s the first priotity after the initial release so thank you for your interest and I hope you will be happy with it in the future!!
I have no idea what people keep talking about when they say Arch/CachyOS is “unstable”. I have had so many more issues with running Debian (usually on servers) over the years. Since I swapped my desktop to CachyOS over a year ago, I have basically no issues at all. Just one very minor thing that fixed itself after a few days (bug in kde on new version released). For like 15 months of use, that’s spectacular compared to any other system I’ve ever used (especially including Debian and of course Windows, obviously).
What exactly is the goal? How do you make “no issues” and “it just works” more stable?
I’m completely on your side, I have NEVER had less issues with an OS ever since running Arch and/or CachyOS, however issues could arise and that is enough for the usual Reddit dickhead to talk someone who’s asking for their first distro out of using anything Arch based. I’m tired of hearing these fucking “no you can’t recommend CachyOS, a new user should not touch Arch”, “CachyOS will break three times within your first week of using it”, “it has the AUR so you will contract HIV instantly by using it”, I just can’t hear it anymore which is why I want to provide people with an option that still has them on an Arch based distro but with added peace of mind and speed optimizations out of the box. You know, that’s the thing, I personally find Arch easy and intuitive and don’t get where people get the idea that it breaks all the time from, but that IS the perception however.
Stable vs Unstable does not mean anything to do with bugginess or prone to breakage.
It literally just means package version changes.
Stable meaning packages update slowly and only minor versions or security.
Unstable means packages update frequently including major versions
Inherently rolling releases are unstable.
My personal experience too is that Arch has been the best distro for lack of bugs and issues on my machines than Fedora or Debian etc.
This is why we should call it “bleeding edge” rather than “unstable” it’s a much more accurate name and it exemplifies the advantages (albeit leaving out the (minor) disadvantages)
I have no idea what people keep talking about when they say Arch/CachyOS is “unstable”.
a) stable in the sense of not changing, or more specific not changing dramatically the user experience and not breaking compatibility, so you can rely on being the same, and b) stable in the sense of not breaking by bugs and issues. Those are two different topics sharing the same wording of stable/unstable. It’s a similar issue of the word “Free”, which could mean either Open Source or no cost in money.
Archlinux is unstable, in the sense that it changes frequently, without warning for most of the time, and this can break compatibility or user experience. Compare the other extreme Debian, which is very stable.
Compare the other extreme Debian, which is very stable.
In the sense that is unchanging, sure. But that’s one hell of a bad word to describe that in this context. In my experience the incompatibilities caused by only ancient versions of things available in the repo of even a newly released Debian are not helpful. Stable wouldn’t be the word I choose to describe the situation, or the fiddling and tinkering that results from that. Often having to go outside of the repo to solve, defeating the whole point of said repo.
Arch in my limited experience is much more stable, in the sense of “just works” and always having up to date software. If I want to use something, I can just install it (from the repo), the chance of it not being the current release are slim.
You’re coming into a discussion about two different linux release models misunderstanding both their established terminology and their purposes, and then claiming one of them is “bad” because you tried to use Debian in a way it wasn’t intended to be used.
It’s the way that word has been used for over 20 years.
The word stable for describing unchanged is a common way of doing so. Especially to differentiate them from their development or experimental versions. That contributes to confusion and disagreements with the other meaning of the word. Unfortunately this word is common usage in both cases. In example Archlinux as a rolling release is unstable by definition. It does not mean its unstable in sense of issues, however depending on the user and use case it can be unstable a lot (or stable a lot).
Just an fyi you can basically get the full steamOS frontend as a session pretty dang easy with gamescope. I’m not talking just normal big picture mode either, like just the normal steamOS gaming front end.
I have it setup with fedora 44 kde right now for when I’m using my TV with my PC across the room.
The frontend isn’t even the goal, I won’t even be adding this at all unless it’s an often requested feature. Currently you can select KDE Plasma or Gnome during your install and both ship pretry much vanilla except for the distro’s logo and fastfetch. It’s intended to behave like SteamOS from a back-end perspective for lack of a better word!
IIRC the CachyOS optimizations were basically a rounding error. I’m thinking of just switching my gaming PC to Fedora (and switching my Fedora Laptop to OpenSUSE maybe).
Honestly, for the packages I do agree. You are not going to notice if your damn font is compiled with v3 flags or not lmao. The kernels however do apply a meaningful improvement, even if it’s just in general desktop use, you DO notice the jump from 250Hz to 1000Hz. Currently I’ll just ship the regular linux-cachyos kernel with the EEVDF scheduler which is more general purpose, but if you select BORE for gaming or (I forgot the name) for throughput, it becomes even more apparent. I get almost a minute shaved off compiling the kernels when I use a good kernel!
Why switch the laptop to OpenSUSE?
Is arch really this hard? I’ve been on it for 3 years with practically no issues. It “just works”.
Nope, I don’t find it that hard either, but we are in a bubble here. The average “which distro should I pick” post suggests SteamOS but only with a full AMD system and when people suggest CachyOS, it’s met with “bUt YOu cAN’t sUgGesT aN ArcH bASeD diStrO tO a BegInNer” so I hope to bridge the gap for people that are waiting for a general-purpose SteamOS release PLUS the CachyOS performance on top. Also some distros do offer people to add the CachyOS repos, which is however forbidden due to their repo policy. Yes it is open source, but they understandably don’t want their servers and mirrors to be used by people not even running their distro. As I will compile the kernels for now, ALL packages in the future and host them myself, I actually comply with their repo policy as one of the few distros.
wdym about hard? this is to achieve immutability plus kernel efficiency improvements.
I just see all these derivatives and everyone saying “to make arch more accessible and easy”. I just dont get it I guess.
this is something else i guess, it’s not about UX but about how the system works kind of. i’m not exactly sure about how silverblue does it but think of it this way. not everything in your system needs to be mutable (your home dir does) so those parts are isolated and made immutable, the user cannot modify them, this helps to keep a more stable system. they can be changed when the system updates them , but it’s more like they are replaced and a one image is built rather than a modification if you will.
Jup, you got it right, the “easier and accessible” part just arises as a byproduct of making Arch atomic. By nature this will make the install pre-configured and thus easier to get into even if this isn’t even the goal but rather just stability and peace of mind.
It used to have more problems. As others have noted, there is always the possibility of updates breaking something with the rolling release model. But for the last few years, it has been stable enough that a user knowledgeable and willing to read a log and modify a configuration file has likely been fine.
As has been noted in the ArchWiki that is expected to be read by users, one should always check for package-related news before upgrading their Arch system. This is because package changes and breakages that require user intervention do occur, and ignoring them can sometimes leave a broken system. Arch isn’t really hard after getting over the bootstrap hurdle, but simply requires more upkeep effort than most point release distros would.
Yeah I just have arch news as my homepage. Haven’t seen a breaking change that applies to normal gaming desktop usage in a while.
I think the biggest one in recent (past year) would have been the upgrade tree to nvidia-open, which would break 10-series and older support without changing package on affected systems. Definitely a lot of the more recent breakages are not large-scale problems, but they do still exist.
Why the name? I find distros with these names that are hard to say annoying to speak about, so I would suggest better name. Something short, catchy and easy to say for people with different languages. But don’t make it too general either so that it is also easy to search for.
Second comment because I just remembered: my initial idea was to simply call it Arch-Atomic, but just the fact of being atomic alone already would violate their trademark policy, which is why I went with my favorite isotope!
Okay, I’m just going to reply to this one really quick before sleeping, my intention was for this to be the short version of Plutonium-239 so it matches better with the logo. I kind of hope for this to be colloquially refered to as just Plutonium, but that itself as a name sounded boring. You are right to point it out and I agree, it was a placeholder at first however that name eventually grew on me too much and the domain is already purchased haha
Hard to google though…
Might I suggest Hesperium (earlier alternate name recommended by Fermi) or Plutium (a name Seaborg considered before deciding plutonium sounded better)?
Name could be Plutium, domain could be pu-239? @yxc999@lemmy.ml
Hmm, in my head I’m pretty set on Plutonium already, but I will take your advice and make the written out name more prominently visible so people will hopefully develop the habit of refering to it as “Plutonium”. If I should decide to have multiple spins on it, I’ll remember that Hesperium and such are cool alternate names, thank you for the ideas!
Why didn’t you call it Starchy?
I both hate this so much and respect the creativity lmao
Same, same. Please don’t call it Starchy. Hope your distro has a longer half-life than Omarchy (pun intended) 😅
Although unintuitiv, judging by the name, hopefully less toxic too!
What will this new distro do that CachyOS doesn’t already (or can’t) do?
I’ll just mostly copy the comment above because it answers my intentions:
I have NEVER had less issues with an OS ever since running Arch and/or CachyOS, however issues COULD arise and that is enough for the usual Reddit dickhead to talk someone who’s asking for their first distro out of using anything Arch based. I’m tired of hearing these fucking “no you can’t recommend CachyOS, a new user should not touch Arch”, “CachyOS will break three times within your first week of using it”, “it has the AUR so you will contract HIV instantly by using it”, I just can’t hear it anymore which is why I want to provide people with an option that still has them on an Arch based distro but with added peace of mind and speed optimizations out of the box. You know, that’s the thing, I personally find Arch easy and intuitive and don’t get where people get the idea that it breaks all the time from, but that IS the perception however.
You know, that’s the thing, I personally find Arch easy and intuitive and don’t get where people get the idea that it breaks all the time from
I’ve been using Arch since 2008 or 2010, idk. I find it easy and intuitive but I still managed to fuck it up multiple times by now. All of those major fuckups I can remember could probably have been solved by what you’re trying to do with Pu-239.
List of major fuckups off the top of my head, chronologically:
Once it had suddenly contracted some kind of computer AIDS which made the windows pink and caused other graphical errors. Never figured out why, a reinstall solved it.
Another time I installed a bunch of packages without doing a full repo sync before (
pacman -Sinstead of-Syu), which left the system in an inconsistent state. Had snapshots of the root partition I could roll back to.The third time happened only recently and made my desktop unusable for half a year because I couldn’t be bothered to fix the fucking bootloader. Huge update (4-5GiB in size, didn’t update for a few weeks or months even) slowed down the whole system due to btrfs having some exhausted inodes or sth, which made the system crash and the bootloader disappear. This even fucked up my firmware so for whatever reason the system can’t boot from /boot, only from the EFI system partition. My current workaround is copying the files from /boot to the ESP until I can be arsed to figure out the issue.
Damn that sounds like a pain in the ass. Yeah, I personally have btrfs snapshots set up on my main workstation and had to use them once, but I just envision having peace of mind that you won’t even noticing that something broke.
I think the main point is, that this new distribution is operating in an atomic form. Similar to how SteamOS or Bazzite works in regard that, but more general compute oriented like CashyOS and not a gaming distro. When I understand this correctly.
It’s pointless and stupid is what it is.
Please let people have fun with computers, thank you. This doesn’t sound like the 100th Arch reskin and doesn’t sound like “just a bunch of config files” either.
If you need to start a flamewar, please do it with that far-right LLM slopfest grift that is Omarchy.
Thank you for the comment! Omarchy is pretty much just a facists vibe-coded Hyprland rice shipped as a distro used for money-laundering while I try to provide something useful that bridges a gap between stability and performance. Scroll down to the disclaimer section, click on the link and see me struggling to make an ugly logo instead of asking an AI lmao
Love it!! You seem to have a similar stance on LLMs as I do. They’re useful if used correctly, but still destroying the world for nothing in 95% of cases, because most people using them are stupid and talentless.
Jup, I DO use AI and bought an Intel B70 to run stuff locally with my own llama.cpp-sycl AUR package, but just to automate meaningless and tedious work. For example I have a .sh script that I run once and compile all four kernel versions and push them to my website automatically. That .sh is completely vibe-coded locally, the only person I could harm by that is myself haha. That way I can save time and pay attention to the actually relevant stuff. But vibe-coding stuff that could harm the user’s experience is a hard no for me.
Why ostree instead of bootc?
My initial idea was to just literally reverse-engineer the way SteamOS does it but when I saw what a mess this was I looked at a few other distros and how Fedora Silverblue used ostree seemed the most intuitive for me to program so yeah, that’s pretty much the reason haha. Are you just asking for clarification or do you think bootc has some advantages that you care to explain? Now would be the perfect time as the only machines running this are my ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and two friends on their spare laptops.
So don’t you think you’ve come full circle and invented Bazzite again?
Haha, good thing to point out, however my plan is to make the second release able to be “unlocked” so you can pretty much treat it like vanilla Arch Linux but with a failsafe atomic way of the updates being applied. Being immutable is just the default configuration. Think of it more like Arch-Atomic but I couldn’t choose that name due to their trademark policy.
i recently thought of exactly this but with nixos instead fedora silverblue. sounds very interesting!
Why NixOS? I found NixOS to be very inefficient with resources like human time, CPU time and storage.
