Thoughts on openSUSE Micro OSs Kalpa and Aeon?

Read a distrowatch review that dropped earlier today discussing the two of them and kind of tears them apart: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250714. I used both a year or so ago and Aeon seemed to perform well enough, but I was pretty disappointed with Kalpa. What are folks experiences with them and how do they compare with something like Fedora Atomic Desktops if you have experience with both?

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I think I had this bug before where I had to change the tty to actually get into the graphical environment.
I used Aeon before, it wasn't bad. The default apps were better than Fedora Silverblue's (it had Tweaks preinstalled, didn't have Firefox installed as an RPM). It uses Distrobox rather than Toolbox, which is nice because Distrobox lets you specify a custom home for each box. Though Distrobox hasn't seen any development these past few months and their decision to use POSIX compliant shell script seems like a maintenance nightmare. Toolbox uses Go.
But my biggest problem with MicroOS is that I don't feel like the update mechanism is as robust as Fedora Atomic. At the end of the day, it's using zypper and btrfs snapshots. It doesn't have the same protections against configuration drift, you can only rollback to versions of the OS you've previously installed (with Fedora Atomic you can rollback to any specific commit, even ones you've never installed).
And Fedora Atomic's bootc is super nice for customizing your image.
- 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?
  
  A system that has updated from say Ubuntu 16.04 to 24.04 is different from a system that fresh installed Ubuntu 24.04.
  The upgrade process is imperfect. It may keep older software around, old configuration files. Users may also make small tweaks and forget about them.
  I remember like a year ago OpenSUSE Tumbleweed broke for users who had old installs. They were using the old networking stack, the upgrade system never migrated them to the newer networking stack. And since OpenSUSE’s test suite was only made up of new installs, the issue wasn’t caught until after it was released.
  Fedora Atomic tries to solve this issue. When you update, the entire root filesystem is effectively replaced (the immutable parts anyway). Though it tries not to touch manual changes you make in places like /etc. It does something called a 3 way merge to preserve your changes and does keep better track of them than traditional distros.
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.

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