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Thoughts on openSUSE Micro OSs Kalpa and Aeon?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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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.
Ah that makes sense. Kind of surprised Aeon / Kalpa don't have a similar feature but it does seem like the fedora atomic distros have had a little more time to cook in comparison to openSUSEs attempts. It would be nice to see something like this implemented at some point, but I am sure the current maintainers already have a lot on their plate. Thank you for breaking it down for me!