This web page doesn't do a good job of motivating the reader.
I understand what the Plasma Desktop Environment is. But what is "atomic and transactional Linux"? What are the advantages to the alternatives? What other projects are similar? What is the motivation for this project in particular? Most importantly, why should I want to use it?
It's a glorified Live CD, with added "persistence" for user data. Updates are done by replacing the system install (which is readonly during normal operation, just like a Live CD) and rebooting, with an A+B mechanism enabling seamless updates during operation, as well as rollback if the new install fails. It's the modern "cattle not pets" approach to system administration: every system is running a well-defined ("atomic") Live CD equivalent, not something bespoke that's the unpredictable result of partial updates and/or edits on the running system.
Linux distros that are updated with full system snapshots instead of package by package, similar to Android. The key difference is most of / is mounted read-only[0] and is only changed by distribution provided updates so you and the distro team always know exactly what's running.
> What are the advantages to the alternatives?
Greater control and stability since its essentially always running in a supported configuration. Easy roll-backs to a previous update if something goes wrong. You always know exactly what your system is running if you want to keep it in sync across machines (more useful in a server setting).
> What other projects are similar
Kalpa is a "sibling" project to AeonOS, which is atomic OpenSUSE but with Gnome (and other changes, which I'll get to). There's also the Fedora Atomic line of Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue (KDE and Gnome respectively), U-Blue, Bazzite, SteamOS, and more. I think most major distro lines have an Atomic variant at this point.
> What is the motivation for this project in particular?
For Kalpa specifically, it's to offer a KDE alternative to AeonOS. Originally there was just AeonOS, which was OpenSUSE MicroOS (an atomic version of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) with GNOME installed. Aeon has diverged greatly from MicroOS though and I think it no longer uses it as an upstream. AeonOS also refused to support KDE[1], so Kalpa was created. Kalpa still uses MicroOS as its upstream and I'm not sure if there's any plans to change that.
> Most importantly, why should I want to use it?
I use it on my personal laptop because it lets me have all the benefits of a rolling distro (up to date packages) without the stability concerns. Updates apply automatically in the background and I know when I reboot I'll always have a working system available to me.
[0] /etc is mounted as an overlay FS so you can still make changes to it. /var, /usr/local, and /srv are also still user-writable. I think /mnt is too but I forget off hand.
[1] Aeon is generally anti-customization and does its best to only offer one way of doing things. This is to prevent configuration drift and reduce the maintenance burden per snapshot. GNOME also has a more regular release cadence, which makes it much easier to integrate than KDE (or so I've been told..)
Would the A/B filesystem approach à la Android be a good way to distribute Linux with ZFS-on-root without all the angst from DKMS modules versioning?
[Maybe unrelated, but just occurred to me (some horror stories have prevented me from trying ZFS-on-boot in linux after Ubuntu botched it with their Zsys “adventure”).]
If i understand the intention of a zfs root combined with an a/b approach — it feels like this btrfs root and immutable gives you the same benefits but with better mainline support.
It's closer to the "sealed system volume" model that macOS uses. The core OS filesystem isn't (normally) writable, although you can finagle it to add drivers and such.
Yes, all projects in this sphere should communicate better.
An atomic distro is one in which the updates are swapped atomically at reboots. They also go by the name of immutable distros. Only the "system" partition is immutable.
Most popular I would say is SteamOS followed by the Fedora variants (Silverblue, Kinoite) and derivatives (Bazzite).
They are still limiting in daily use, rough around some edges.
Yeah. I use bazzite, but had to overlay like 5 apps. Flatpaks are often disappointing or just do not exist. AppImage is awesome, too bad it is used rarely.
It's buried in the About page, but it uses different terminology. They definitely have to review their copy.
> Automatic Updates: Updates never touch your running system, only taking effect on reboot.
> Resilient: Due to the atomic nature of updates, if something goes wrong, the system will automatically roll back to the last known good working state
I've installed https://getaurora.dev/en/, another atomic Linux distro, for a non technical user and find it really good. I've read arguments that its architecture was better than kalpa, but I don't find it back and I have no sufficient knowledge or experience of both to have an opinion.
Kalpa is an immutable distro based on MicroOS with KDE as it's desktop environment.
MicroOS and its derivatives are all based on Tumbleweed. MicroOS was intended to be used for container workloads. Aeon grew out of that with a GNOME desktop, Kalpa a KDE desktop. Because they were focused in a way Tumbleweed is not, they are a more opinionated distro. On the other hand, Tumbleweed is a rolling distro that wants to be all things for everyone.
I was trying to figure out the change as well - I've only used Tumbleweed through WSL before. Does it provide a desktop environment preinstalled or is it a 'bring-your-own' deal? (if not, that seems to be the big thing that Kalpa brings to the table?)
Kalpa is great and hits way above its alpha status; I've been running it on my laptop for months now with zero issues. It's been really nice to not have to worry about updates, just gotta reboot it every now and then and most things just work.
I wanted to try an Atomic Linux, I think I tried the Fedora flavor, nothing really worked for me for some reason, I gave in to Arch and tried it a la EndeavourOS. Have not looked back since.
You might know this, but unfortunately, if you leave an Arch install unused for enough time, and then run an update, you might not be able to boot into a working desktop.
[EDIT]
Oh, and I had a lot of problems installing Kalpa (from the submission) - all which I got fixed by using ChatGPT.
I was going to guess that it may be easier to get new contributors on a general site like Codeberg, but it seems like they're just using Codeberg pages to host the actual website, not using it for the bug tracker or anything like that. Interesting choice indeed.
I have run Fedora Silverblue on my workstation since 2021 at least and I wouldn’t go back to a regular distro ever. I’ll jump ship for an immutable distro not based on RPMs (or APT) which I loathe.
The secret is that all your power is within a distrobox container. All my dev tools, Emacs are in an Arch Linux container.
It silently messes with the kernel boot flags which breaks the boot process If you do get it to work it silently adds extra broken repos which make it impossible to install packages.
Why would any distro want to support a tool that intentionally breaks things? Ventoy could just boot ISOs without messing with them and everything would work fine, but the developers insist on injecting garbage.
I’ve had trouble installing proxmox with ventoy, I had to install debian and then proxmox as a package. AFAIK there isn’t really an alternative to ventoy?
This web page doesn't do a good job of motivating the reader.
I understand what the Plasma Desktop Environment is. But what is "atomic and transactional Linux"? What are the advantages to the alternatives? What other projects are similar? What is the motivation for this project in particular? Most importantly, why should I want to use it?
>But what is "atomic and transactional Linux"?
It's a glorified Live CD, with added "persistence" for user data. Updates are done by replacing the system install (which is readonly during normal operation, just like a Live CD) and rebooting, with an A+B mechanism enabling seamless updates during operation, as well as rollback if the new install fails. It's the modern "cattle not pets" approach to system administration: every system is running a well-defined ("atomic") Live CD equivalent, not something bespoke that's the unpredictable result of partial updates and/or edits on the running system.
> what is "atomic and transactional Linux"?
Linux distros that are updated with full system snapshots instead of package by package, similar to Android. The key difference is most of / is mounted read-only[0] and is only changed by distribution provided updates so you and the distro team always know exactly what's running.
> What are the advantages to the alternatives?
Greater control and stability since its essentially always running in a supported configuration. Easy roll-backs to a previous update if something goes wrong. You always know exactly what your system is running if you want to keep it in sync across machines (more useful in a server setting).
> What other projects are similar
Kalpa is a "sibling" project to AeonOS, which is atomic OpenSUSE but with Gnome (and other changes, which I'll get to). There's also the Fedora Atomic line of Fedora Kinoite and Silverblue (KDE and Gnome respectively), U-Blue, Bazzite, SteamOS, and more. I think most major distro lines have an Atomic variant at this point.
> What is the motivation for this project in particular?
For Kalpa specifically, it's to offer a KDE alternative to AeonOS. Originally there was just AeonOS, which was OpenSUSE MicroOS (an atomic version of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) with GNOME installed. Aeon has diverged greatly from MicroOS though and I think it no longer uses it as an upstream. AeonOS also refused to support KDE[1], so Kalpa was created. Kalpa still uses MicroOS as its upstream and I'm not sure if there's any plans to change that.
> Most importantly, why should I want to use it?
I use it on my personal laptop because it lets me have all the benefits of a rolling distro (up to date packages) without the stability concerns. Updates apply automatically in the background and I know when I reboot I'll always have a working system available to me.
[0] /etc is mounted as an overlay FS so you can still make changes to it. /var, /usr/local, and /srv are also still user-writable. I think /mnt is too but I forget off hand.
[1] Aeon is generally anti-customization and does its best to only offer one way of doing things. This is to prevent configuration drift and reduce the maintenance burden per snapshot. GNOME also has a more regular release cadence, which makes it much easier to integrate than KDE (or so I've been told..)
Would the A/B filesystem approach à la Android be a good way to distribute Linux with ZFS-on-root without all the angst from DKMS modules versioning?
[Maybe unrelated, but just occurred to me (some horror stories have prevented me from trying ZFS-on-boot in linux after Ubuntu botched it with their Zsys “adventure”).]
If i understand the intention of a zfs root combined with an a/b approach — it feels like this btrfs root and immutable gives you the same benefits but with better mainline support.
Is there a relationship with concepts such as NixOS?
It's closer to the "sealed system volume" model that macOS uses. The core OS filesystem isn't (normally) writable, although you can finagle it to add drivers and such.
Yes, all projects in this sphere should communicate better.
An atomic distro is one in which the updates are swapped atomically at reboots. They also go by the name of immutable distros. Only the "system" partition is immutable.
Most popular I would say is SteamOS followed by the Fedora variants (Silverblue, Kinoite) and derivatives (Bazzite).
They are still limiting in daily use, rough around some edges.
Yeah. I use bazzite, but had to overlay like 5 apps. Flatpaks are often disappointing or just do not exist. AppImage is awesome, too bad it is used rarely.
It's buried in the About page, but it uses different terminology. They definitely have to review their copy.
> Automatic Updates: Updates never touch your running system, only taking effect on reboot.
> Resilient: Due to the atomic nature of updates, if something goes wrong, the system will automatically roll back to the last known good working state
I've installed https://getaurora.dev/en/, another atomic Linux distro, for a non technical user and find it really good. I've read arguments that its architecture was better than kalpa, but I don't find it back and I have no sufficient knowledge or experience of both to have an opinion.
This appears to be a "pre-beta" site, so this will be why it is not polished yet. From the documentation page :
"note: These installation instructions will be changing, with the Beta release of Kalpa"
A bit rough around the edges - so probably unfair to publicise too prominently yet.
This blog post might provide useful context: https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-...
This is a cool idea, but it’s not clear what problem it’s solving. Tumbleweed is already great
Kalpa is an immutable distro based on MicroOS with KDE as it's desktop environment.
MicroOS and its derivatives are all based on Tumbleweed. MicroOS was intended to be used for container workloads. Aeon grew out of that with a GNOME desktop, Kalpa a KDE desktop. Because they were focused in a way Tumbleweed is not, they are a more opinionated distro. On the other hand, Tumbleweed is a rolling distro that wants to be all things for everyone.
I was trying to figure out the change as well - I've only used Tumbleweed through WSL before. Does it provide a desktop environment preinstalled or is it a 'bring-your-own' deal? (if not, that seems to be the big thing that Kalpa brings to the table?)
Tumbleweed comes with desktop environment options. You can select from a few.
I guess you get the atomic system, but with Tumbleweed you get snapshot backups anyway.
One of the main advantages of Tumbleweed is the extensive testing pipeline. I'm not sure how a derivative would be able to offer a similar experience
"I have a minor inconvenience -- I know, I'll create an entirely new distribution where 99.92% is identical to the base"
How else are you going to improve the linux gene pool? Breeding linux distros ain't gonna cut it :)
Kalpa is great and hits way above its alpha status; I've been running it on my laptop for months now with zero issues. It's been really nice to not have to worry about updates, just gotta reboot it every now and then and most things just work.
Which things do not "just work"?
I wanted to try an Atomic Linux, I think I tried the Fedora flavor, nothing really worked for me for some reason, I gave in to Arch and tried it a la EndeavourOS. Have not looked back since.
You might know this, but unfortunately, if you leave an Arch install unused for enough time, and then run an update, you might not be able to boot into a working desktop.
[EDIT]
Oh, and I had a lot of problems installing Kalpa (from the submission) - all which I got fixed by using ChatGPT.
I've left it for a long time and also run it daily sometimes, still no issues. My understanding is brick level changes usually are fixed quickly.
Interesting they are hosting on codeberg. Opensuse has a pretty established hosting/build architecture provided by Suse.
I was going to guess that it may be easier to get new contributors on a general site like Codeberg, but it seems like they're just using Codeberg pages to host the actual website, not using it for the bug tracker or anything like that. Interesting choice indeed.
Codeberg is AMAZING. fast and super simpler. KISS
Just works
This rules but the landing page could benefit from a Download Now type button for the iso page.
Isn't OpenSUSE for sale? At the least distrowatch said this recently.
Has anyone had a good long term experience with Atomic?
I admittedly only used it on a 13 year old gaming computer and couldn't get the GPU drivers because... you know containers.
This is something trivial with a regular install. (Especially with LLMs to assist)
I want to like Atomic, but it feels like an Apple-like regression in computing.
I have run Fedora Silverblue on my workstation since 2021 at least and I wouldn’t go back to a regular distro ever. I’ll jump ship for an immutable distro not based on RPMs (or APT) which I loathe.
The secret is that all your power is within a distrobox container. All my dev tools, Emacs are in an Arch Linux container.
What's with the Ventoy hate. Every linux distro can be installed with Ventoy except for SuSe ones
It silently messes with the kernel boot flags which breaks the boot process If you do get it to work it silently adds extra broken repos which make it impossible to install packages.
Why would any distro want to support a tool that intentionally breaks things? Ventoy could just boot ISOs without messing with them and everything would work fine, but the developers insist on injecting garbage.
I’ve had trouble installing proxmox with ventoy, I had to install debian and then proxmox as a package. AFAIK there isn’t really an alternative to ventoy?