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.)

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[–] 28 points 1 month ago (14 children)

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?

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    This is why we should call it "bleeding edge" rather than "unstable" it's a much more accurate name and it exemplifies the advantages (albeit leaving out the (minor) disadvantages)

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    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).

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    [–] 19 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Not personally interested,but a big question with something like this is how much time you have and how do you plan to maintain it in the long term? Don’t want to dissuade you, but I really don’t know if we need yet another distribution based on arch.

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 1 month ago

    Yeah I get you, recently with everyone vibe-coding their stuff, there have been a lot of useless distros, but I really feel like I'm onto something useful. I'm self employed and basically temporarily took on less orders so I can work on this full-time until I get the first version out and actual full on development turns into maintaining and improving. I can definitely manage it and actually look forward to it as it's super fun to me! Also I used today to make some changes as you can read in the comment I just left.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 1 month ago

    UPDATE

    I took your suggestions to heart and updated the website to reflect the changes I implemented today. The big change is that I found a way to keep pacman fully intact and functioning, but make it apply the changes atomically. So now this isn't just limited to Flatpaks, but LITERALLY Arch Linux but made atomic.

    The new intro reads:

    "Plutonium-239 is Arch Linux, made atomic. It combines the rolling release model of Arch Linux with an atomically updated root filesystem inspired by SteamOS on top of the heavily optimized CachyOS performance kernel. Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Pu-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the full power of pacman and the official Arch repositories, with the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath."

    For more information, please check out the updated "How it works" section. Thank you all a lot for the feedback!

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago (11 children)

    Is arch really this hard? I've been on it for 3 years with practically no issues. It "just works".

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Big question: Will it condone LLM generated / "assisted" programming?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    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

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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago (9 children)
  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    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.

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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    Very interesting approach, please keep us posted and best of luck!

    Edit: just thought, have you ever heard of RakuOS ? They seem to have similar ideas, about the unlocking while still atomic.

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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    CachyOS automatically does bootable BTRFS snapshots with every update. I don’t really see any advantage of atomic distros over this.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Can't speak much about OP's distro or CachyOS, but I can talk about how Fedora Atomic differs from simply doing btrfs backups before every update.

    First, updates are not the only thing that can modify the base system. Installing packages, installing plugins or extensions, manual user modifications, etc, can all end up bricking the system. Fedora Atomic makes the base system immutable so that the only way of making modifications is via rpm-ostree, which ensures that you always have a way to rollback.

    Second, one of the issues with traditional update mechanisms is that over time, updates might not do proper clean-up and leave artifacts. This is a harder problem than people realize, because users can have all sorts of permutations of packages and versions installed, and the update mechanism has to account for all of them. Over time, and many updates, a system can accumulate tons of small update errors and finally fall over. I've had this issue myself and heard of this issue from multiple sources. Fedora Atomic solves this by ensuring that every update is like a complete re-install.

    Third, since every Fedora Atomic user uses the same base system as their distro maintainers, they can be sure that their base system is well tested. Bugs are more reproducible, and thus can be fixed faster. None of those "works on my system, you're on your own" issues.

    Fourth, this one isn't a benefit to the user but the community. Fedora Atomic (and universal blue) distros are easy to fork. This is why there are so many flavors now. Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, Secureblue, Wayblue, etc. Instead of one generic distro with a huge community relying on a few maintainers, like Fedora used to have, now you have smaller specialized communities with their own leaders, and users can choose which community they align with more. And you can even switch communities, since rpm-ostree allows you to "rebase" to a different distro (eg Aurora -> Bazzite).

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    [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    Why didn't you call it Starchy?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Why ostree instead of bootc?

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    [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    This is very cool! I like the idea of atomic distros although I haven't really gotten into them much, if you keep on working on this project I might join it.

    Question: I'm a bit confused about the package management system you talked about. Flatpaks for user level packages? What about the official arch repo and the AUR? I know other atomic distro's don't really work with traditional package managers, what does this mean for Pu-239? If there's no AUR then there is no Arch Linux at least for me.

    Also that name could probably do with some work lol. Maybe work on a shorthand way of spelling it and a better way to pronounce it? I'm not sure.

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    [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Is your distro Pu-239 going to be The Bomb?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (16 children)

    What will this new distro do that CachyOS doesn't already (or can't) do?

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