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Plutonium-239 - Arch Linux made unbreakable and lightning fast. Initial in-development release, announced here on Lemmy first. (pu-239.org)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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!

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[–] [S] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I was just about to go to bed so apologies for the short answer, I can elaborate tomorrow if you wish. The home folder, including your settings/configs will survive, there's no difference in the way you organize files to a regular Arch install. The partitioning is preset and non-customizable (for now at least). So no need to worry, you simply install it with the hardcoded presets and use it like you would use your current install! I will likely set up a kind of wiki page to make this more sorted and readable than the current bloated drop-down menu so I can cover this in more detail in the future.

Edit: aah, I overread the first time that you have a home folder that you keep. In your case I would back it up on another drive/cloud first and then try one of the installer options that fit you the most. I should get the option for manual partitioning up and running, but if you don't do it it exactly like the installer expects, it will fail, which is why I only defined three pre-set options.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

    Oh, cool. Thanks for replying. I did install it in a VM for now. Now that I know what my options are, I can take it from there.

    I won't be able to back up all my data from home in a way that males sense right now outside of my laptop, so Barr metal won't be happening until next weekend.

    It feels pretty solid right now. I'm going to replicate my KDE configuration from the laptop onto the P-239 VM see how it behaves.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    That's nice to hear! My personal feedback and the feedback from people that have tried it so far seems way better than I anticipated, noone seems to have any big issues. A little more choice during the install, a little less weird messages during updates (nothing critical, just looks odd) and some AUR packages that don't install in a way that conform to the Arch guidelines (which is more on them than on the OS) and that's about all the negatives.

    I'll be on vacation for a week and only take my underpowered Thinkpad with me so I'll be working on some little qol changes here and there to bring a more polished version in a few short weeks. If noone finds anything big that needs fixing I might even be able to justify bumping the version number of the next release to 0.1.0 instead of 0.0.2 since it's way more stable than I dared to expect.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    I like what I'm seeing here, since you are actually covering a niche that nobody else seems to be covering (maybe they are and I just haven't seen it).

    I find value in all this. I am certainly no Dev, but have enough experience with many different Linux distros to at least serve as a guinea-pig for good projects. Enjoy your vacation, I'll be trying to break your distro while you're away.

    One thing I believe this could benefit from, if possible, is a way to discuss the project in real time, Matrix, IRC, anything really. Just a thought.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 hours ago

    I appreciate it! I'd be especially interested in knowing if there are any locations/directories that the user expects to be carried through deployments or to be writeable that get deleted/overwritten during updates or are read-only in the first place. Finding that would perhaps also fix the issues with some AUR packages not wanting to install. Ideally you can e-mail me your findings to the address on my Codeberg profile and I could write on the code during the vacation and actually test in a VM on my main PC once I get back.

    Regarding the platform to discuss on, someone else asked a similar thing today so I'm just pasting my reply here "Hmm, I’m undecided. Me personally, I couldn’t handle running a forum due to my autism, that would burn me out instantly. Having one entirely community run with me occasionally lurking in like I do here would probably be the only realistic option."

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