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.)
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 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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
What will this new distro do that CachyOS doesn’t already (or can’t) do?
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.
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.
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
Why ostree instead of bootc?
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) 😅
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.
