19 days ago I announced my plans here on Lemmy and after four weeks and ~300 hours in total, I can finally share the first ISO of my project with this community. “sometime next week” yeah that was optimistic lmao I want to thank you again for the feedback on the initial announcement and I can say I tried my best to address and implement a lot of your suggestions!
For the people that haven’t read the last post, this is the basic gist of it:
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Plutonium-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the bleeding-edge Arch repositories and the power of the AUR but all of that with a 5-20% performance boost from a heavily optimized kernel and the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.
For the ISO and the in-depth technical documentation, please visit my website at the link in the title!
The 0.0.1 version is a pre-release/in-development version meant for experienced people interested in this project. I tested it extensively and I’m running it for a few days now on my Thinkpad myself, however I can IN NO WAY guarantee that this is 100% viable to daily-drive just yet.
I’m very thankful for every person that considers testing this distro in a VM or on a secondary PC to contribute to the development of this project. Any feedback is appreciated and I hope my work can be of value to you!
Edit: from the feedback that was pm’d to me so far it seems like it’s working fine when it’s running but two people had issues with the hardware detection during the install. If you are experiencing a similar issue, please send me your hardware specs and the output of the log where it failed and I’ll be able to make it more robust!
A distro in just 300 hours? is it artisan coded or sloppadoppadoo?
Well, it were four 80 hour weeks and I “only” reverse-engineered the way Fedora makes their distro atomic with ostree but adapted to Arch. I did try to stay true to the Arch philosophy of keeping it minimal otherwise so it wasn’t that big of a project!
Edit: Sometimes I had to spin up Qwen 3.8 27B because the error codes the installer threw out were literally humanly unreadable so I had no clue what even went wrong but other than that it was by hand lmao
Incredible lol
Ayy, cachyos kernel with ostree atomic model, and minimal LLM involvement? Sounds like the next distro I will try :D Thanks for the works!
Thank you! I was wondering why noone has tried that yet and now I know why, but hey, it works now. I hope you will have fun with it!
This is pretty cool!
No, you are pretty cool!
Does it come with KDE preinstalled or is that just for the screenshot?
I’d love to give it a try on my secondary laptop as it sounds just great, but I really can’t stand KDE.
Edit: KDE is the only desktop available, but if I understand that correctly alternatives are on the roadmap?
Yes, it does come preinstalled with KDE as implementing a proper desktop selection is planned but would take even more time. This is Arch however, you can uninstall everything you want. Throw KDE out and install whatever desktop enviornment you want, you still keep the kernel and the ostree update model, that’s what’s so cool about it!
Apologizes, not sure if I followed, what makes it atomic?
To put it in simple terms: when you update your system, you will have two deployments. One deployment stays exactly the same, the copy will be updated. Until you restart you stay on the original. When you restart, the system automatically attempts to boot the updated copy. If it fails, it automatically loads the original again.
That way the updates are atomic in the sense that you either boot into a fully updated system or simply back into the untouched original, nothing in between.
Edit: if you look up how Fedora Silverblue works, it’s pretty much the same, just applied to Arch!
The part that I’m a bit confused is this paragraph:
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Plutonium-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the bleeding-edge Arch repositories and the power of the AUR but all of that with a 5-20% performance boost from a heavily optimized kernel and the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.
And then the follow up:
Edit: if you look up how Fedora Silverblue works, it’s pretty much the same, just applied to Arch!
It sounds a bit contradictory. Can we think about Plutonium-239 as of SteamOS that is classic atomic distro and based on Arch or this is more of a case to something like the RakuOS?
Yeah, you are right, I’m not the best at explaining things, I’m sorry. I look at it like literally Arch but the updates are atomic. You can choose to install or uninstall whatever you want, but it gets written with an A/B system during updates so you can always have a fallback. It does come preconfigured from the start, because that was easier to develop for now, but you can treat this like any other Arch install, just with safer updates.
How are you measuring the performance boost? In what areas does it apply?
There are a lot of benchmarks for the CachyOS kernel and it’s mostly single digit performance increases for “normal” tasks but a noticeably more snappy feeling. The mayor increases come in compiling or rendering workloads, there it can easily get into double digits. For example on my 270K, compiling this kernel takes 23 min with the stock linux kernel, 20 minutes with the linux-cachyos kernel in -v3.
Looks cool! Why was it called plutonium?
Thank you! In a perfect world I would have loved to name it “Arch Atomic”, but I’m not affiliated with them so I went for a wordplay on atomic with my favorite isotope!
Finally! I know what I’ll try over the weekend after I made backups 😇
Hell yeah, let me know how it goes!
Looks cool, I’ll drop this on my Thinkpad tonight when I get home from work.
I’m excited to hear your feedback! Keep in mind, some things might be buggy, but please notify me and they will be taken care of.
Will do!
