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.)
Second and last question: Will it support other init systems other than systemd?
Big question: Will it condone LLM generated / “assisted” programming?
Is your distro Pu-239 going to be The Bomb?
HiroshimaOSMay as well be called TrumpOS, we are so dead
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!
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.
Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it’s literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!
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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.
Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it’s literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!
This is awesome, thanks!
Thank you a lot for your interest! So as I pointed out in the other comments, out of the box and for the 0.0.1 release it’s intended to keep the system itself atomically updated through pacman and the user is advised to use flatpaks to install his applications. This is the most user friendly way of going about it, however I’m absolutely on your side and wouldn’t use it that way myself. 0.0.2 will have a way to “unlock” it so you can use the distro like vanilla Arch BUT you get peace of mind from knowing that you have a failsafe way of knowing the system will not break.
For the name, I did want Arch-Atomic at first but noticed this would violate the Arch Linux trademark policy and just went with my favorite isotope as a placeholder that unfortunately grew onto me. I will get off the couch now and edit the website so it’s apparent that Pu-239 is just the shorthand and people will refer to it as Plutonium-239 or just plain Plutonium in the future!
Thanks that does alleviate my concerns, I do like the name Plutonium or Plutonium-os.
That’s an interesting idea, but if you make Arch’s root read only you’re leaving behind pacman/AUR (and to a good extent the Arch wiki) which are usually the main advantages of Arch based distros.
SteamOS solves the stability issue by providing runtimes for games, I didn’t read anything there about anything similar on your distro. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you’re not solving the stability issue, or in other words you will still be unstable as this will be a rolling release. In short I don’t see what would be the advantage of this over base Arch + Snapper (or timeshift).
In that regard, how is this different from Bazzite? I know it will be a different kernel and package versions but in principle the philosophy seems to be exactly the same, and I don’t expect the kernel/packages to be that different either.
Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it’s literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!
Interesting, how are you dealing with pacnew/pacsave files? From your explanation it seems that they would go into the read only filesystem and would need to be resolved manually and preserved there until some old version cleanup is ran.
And while I find the idea of a writable overlay filesystem for the /etc fascinating, I think that could have issues with some rollbacks and backwards incompatible config changes.
At the end of the day seems like a fascinating project, but I wonder if Arch+snapper wouldn’t be better overall.
Why ostree instead of bootc?
My initial idea was to just literally reverse-engineer the way SteamOS does it but when I saw what a mess this was I looked at a few other distros and how Fedora Silverblue used ostree seemed the most intuitive for me to program so yeah, that’s pretty much the reason haha. Are you just asking for clarification or do you think bootc has some advantages that you care to explain? Now would be the perfect time as the only machines running this are my ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and two friends on their spare laptops.
Very interesting, I’ll take a deeper look at that tomorrow, thank you!
So don’t you think you’ve come full circle and invented Bazzite again?
Haha, good thing to point out, however my plan is to make the second release able to be “unlocked” so you can pretty much treat it like vanilla Arch Linux but with a failsafe atomic way of the updates being applied. Being immutable is just the default configuration. Think of it more like Arch-Atomic but I couldn’t choose that name due to their trademark policy.
i recently thought of exactly this but with nixos instead fedora silverblue. sounds very interesting!
Just an fyi you can basically get the full steamOS frontend as a session pretty dang easy with gamescope. I’m not talking just normal big picture mode either, like just the normal steamOS gaming front end.
I have it setup with fedora 44 kde right now for when I’m using my TV with my PC across the room.
The frontend isn’t even the goal, I won’t even be adding this at all unless it’s an often requested feature. Currently you can select KDE Plasma or Gnome during your install and both ship pretry much vanilla except for the distro’s logo and fastfetch. It’s intended to behave like SteamOS from a back-end perspective for lack of a better word!
IIRC the CachyOS optimizations were basically a rounding error. I’m thinking of just switching my gaming PC to Fedora (and switching my Fedora Laptop to OpenSUSE maybe).
Honestly, for the packages I do agree. You are not going to notice if your damn font is compiled with v3 flags or not lmao. The kernels however do apply a meaningful improvement, even if it’s just in general desktop use, you DO notice the jump from 250Hz to 1000Hz. Currently I’ll just ship the regular linux-cachyos kernel with the EEVDF scheduler which is more general purpose, but if you select BORE for gaming or (I forgot the name) for throughput, it becomes even more apparent. I get almost a minute shaved off compiling the kernels when I use a good kernel!
