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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

This is a cool idea, but it’s not clear what problem it’s solving. Tumbleweed is already great

Kalpa is an immutable distro based on MicroOS with KDE as it's desktop environment.

MicroOS and its derivatives are all based on Tumbleweed. MicroOS was intended to be used for container workloads. Aeon grew out of that with a GNOME desktop, Kalpa a KDE desktop. Because they were focused in a way Tumbleweed is not, they are a more opinionated distro. On the other hand, Tumbleweed is a rolling distro that wants to be all things for everyone.

I was trying to figure out the change as well - I've only used Tumbleweed through WSL before. Does it provide a desktop environment preinstalled or is it a 'bring-your-own' deal? (if not, that seems to be the big thing that Kalpa brings to the table?)

Tumbleweed comes with desktop environment options. You can select from a few.

I guess you get the atomic system, but with Tumbleweed you get snapshot backups anyway.

One of the main advantages of Tumbleweed is the extensive testing pipeline. I'm not sure how a derivative would be able to offer a similar experience

"I have a minor inconvenience -- I know, I'll create an entirely new distribution where 99.92% is identical to the base"

How else are you going to improve the linux gene pool? Breeding linux distros ain't gonna cut it :)

Being able to roll back updates/upgrades that go wrong, is not just fixing a minor inconvenience. There's also something about the critical part of the system being less mutable. Desktop Linux has been way too easy to break in the past.

Tubleweed has snapshots and rollbacks too by default. But yeah immutable distros are good for beginners so they don't destroy their system!

The OS this is based on, Tumbleweed, is what provides that capability. I do not think there is anything novel here.

> I do not think there is anything novel here.

Absolutely wrong.

Tumbleweed is a conventional distro. You're root, you can do whatever you want, you have full R/W access to the entire FS, and updating is by installing lots and lots of packages into the live OS while it is running.

Aeon and Kalpa are immutable: the root fs is largely R/O even to root, and you cannot install or update packages on the running system. To install packages into the OS itself you must reboot, and installation is transactional -- it can automatically undo changes that prevented a successful boot.

Kalpa is the KDE desktop version of MicroOS.

> and installation is transactional

Good explanation, but note that Tumbleweed can use transactional-update with btrfs snapshots like MicroOS. Updates are still applied live though.

Okay, fair enough!

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