I’ve been running Tumbleweed for a few years now. It’s great, but it’s not 100% autopilot, updates often require manual intervention (resolving small problems) or updates try to add 50 packages I don’t need (recommends) all the time despite them not being in a pattern. I’ve been looking for a distro on which I could set up automatic updates and forget mostly about it, while still having recent packages; reliability and peace of mind while being on the bleeding edge. Due to having an NVIDIA GPU, LTS distros are a no-go. I’ve debated on the following

  • Debian: packages too old, ideal for my server though.
  • Ubuntu 24.04: Plasma 6 not available until next release. Snap is still a problem.
  • Fedora/Ublue: DNF is painfully slow. Immutable variants are interesting but download full GBs worth of images
  • Arch: insanely fast package manager, but can require manual intervention. Automatic updates aren’t recommended for arch. It also lacks my printer driver on the repos (only available on the AUR). One of the only distros that can truly satisfy my minimalist itch.
  • KDE Neon: Snaps, no nvidia graphics
  • NixOS: Never tried it but apparently the unusual file structure causes many problems

So I ended up trying again OpenSUSE Kalpa. I had completely forgotten about it, and I really like the concept. It’s like the Fedora immutable variants, but instead of downloading whole GBs of images, it creates BTRFS snapshots between normal zypper updates. So you can have the benefits of offline updates without having to wait at boot or at shutdown. Just like silverblue, the concept is to try to install everything through flatpak/distrobox and avoid adding anything unnecessary to the base, so that system updates can be snappy and unproblematic.

I was really tired of opening my laptop, updating everything and then rebooting. I just want to open my pc, have all updates automatically applied in the background through systemd units so that the next time I boot, I have an updated system. No “updating” during next boot. I finally found a distro perfect for me in that regard, and for everyone else who’s tired of babysitting their linux desktops, you should give a shot to Kalpa/Aeon.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    6·
    6 months ago

    Apart from the other comment explaining the many benefits of rpm-ostree to transactional-update (apart from the horrendous name)

    it creates BTRFS snapshots between normal zypper updates. So you can have the benefits of offline updates without having to wait at boot or at shutdown.

    You are referring to standard Fedora here. Atomic variants have no offline update screen.

    Also just having snapshots between updates means you cannot rebase to the updated AND vanilla variant.

    You could make a BTRFS snapshot right after install and keep that from disappearing. But this means when you need to reset, you downgrade tons of packages wich always causes problems with config files etc.

    Just like silverblue, the concept is to try to install everything through flatpak/distrobox and avoid adding anything unnecessary to the base, so that system updates can be snappy and unproblematic.

    As said in the other comment, I dont think this is specific to Atomic Fedora. For sure the long rpm-ostree updates kinda enforce that (they get way longer when layering packages) but rpm-ostree is way more stable than for example Ubuntu APT or Fedora DNF. So I think you should use Flatpak and Distrobox on the traditional distros, while Atomic Fedora is actually less critical.

    “Immutable” OpenSUSE is not any better than mutable OpenSUSE though, their package manager doesnt solve many problems with installing random RPMs to the base. So it needs Flatpaks etc more.

    I was really tired of opening my laptop, updating everything and then rebooting. I just want to open my pc, have all updates automatically applied in the background through systemd units so that the next time I boot, I have an updated system. No “updating” during next boot.

    This is all standard Fedora. Atomic Fedora updates in the background and reboots are as fast as normal ones.

    But there are some issues with just updating automatically:

    • using tons of data when connected to a phone hotspot
    • updating on high system load, causing freezes
    • updating on low battery

    I wrote about this here and uBlue addresses these issues in their ublue-update

    OpenSUSE doesnt mitigate this.