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.)
maybe this is useful for your project https://aerynos.com/tooling/moss/
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.
I took your suggestion to heart and decided to say fuck it and move my whole GitHub over to Codeberg. The non-profit nature, being hosted in Germany where I’m also from and ditching the last Microslop service I have make this something I should have done sooner. The only thing left is the repo for the website itself, I’m gonna set up the actions to automatically sync it with Hetzner tomorrow, I’m done for today!
Als Deutscher kannst Du ja auch Mitglied im Codeberg e.V. werden wenn Dir das wichtig ist. Oder, wie gesagt, die Artefakte bei Microsoft hosten, um dem Verein Geld zu sparen. Microslop darf das gerne bezahlen, oder? 😄
Mal sehen, GitHub war das letzte Big Tech, bzw. USA-basierte was ich genutzt habe und war mir deswegen schon seit langem ein Dorn im Auge, bisher habe ich aber nie die Nerven gehabt zu wechseln. Jetzt war aber der beste Zeitpunkt, da das Hauptrepo noch leer war und ich meine restlichen Projekte aussortiert habe. Die kompilierten Pakete und ISOs kommen eh alle auf meinen Hetzner Webserver, Codeberg hätte quasi “nur” den Source-Code, sollte also verträglich genug sein und GitHub einfach komplett zurückzulassen!
Seconding that. I’ve just read through the website. Got interested. Then my eyes went to the top panel again finally, I’ve read “GitHub”, and my thoughts are “Huh? But this mismatches the rest of the page, especially with the AI stance and some push for simplicity combined with competence.”. Went back here to write about it.
/me a ~10 year old ArchLinux user (using Arch for this long, my Earth age nobody cares about including me anyway). I’m thinking if I wanna actually try this for real. I currently have manually written packages that define the OS dependencies and configuration, and I don’t like the mutability of everything, the default update handling of no-longer-dependencies, the
.pacnew… I still like and appreciate Arch obviously, but the pain points connect.I took your suggestion to heart and decided to say fuck it and move my whole GitHub over to Codeberg. The non-profit nature, being hosted in Germany where I’m also from and ditching the last Microslop service I have make this something I should have done sooner. The only thing left is the repo for the website itself, I’m gonna set up the actions to automatically sync it with Hetzner tomorrow, I’m done for today!
Big question: Will it condone LLM generated / “assisted” programming?
Very interesting approach, please keep us posted and best of luck!
Edit: just thought, have you ever heard of RakuOS ? They seem to have similar ideas, about the unlocking while still atomic.
Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it’s literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!
i recently thought of exactly this but with nixos instead fedora silverblue. sounds very interesting!
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.
Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it’s literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!
Interesting, how are you dealing with pacnew/pacsave files? From your explanation it seems that they would go into the read only filesystem and would need to be resolved manually and preserved there until some old version cleanup is ran.
And while I find the idea of a writable overlay filesystem for the /etc fascinating, I think that could have issues with some rollbacks and backwards incompatible config changes.
At the end of the day seems like a fascinating project, but I wonder if Arch+snapper wouldn’t be better overall.
UPDATE
I took your suggestions to heart and updated the website to reflect the changes I implemented today. The big change is that I found a way to keep pacman fully intact and functioning, but make it apply the changes atomically. So now this isn’t just limited to Flatpaks, but LITERALLY Arch Linux but made atomic.
The new intro reads:
“Plutonium-239 is Arch Linux, made atomic. It combines the rolling release model of Arch Linux with an atomically updated root filesystem inspired by SteamOS on top of the heavily optimized CachyOS performance kernel. Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Pu-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the full power of pacman and the official Arch repositories, with the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.”
For more information, please check out the updated “How it works” section. Thank you all a lot for the feedback!
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.
