Just like the recent Bazzite post, this page is full of buzzwords, but fails to explain what it actually is. It’s an image-based Linux distro. Which is nothing groundbreaking, and a solution looking for a problem, because classic Linux distros just work.
> Aurora is nothing more than a collection of bash scripts, containerfiles and custom programs stitched together.
That sentence appearing on the same page as "rock-solid" is not very convincing either and does not instil confidence.
I want to offer a counter perspective. While the idea is simple and technically not new, it is implemented in a way that allows a huge swath of people to migrate from windows relatively painlessly. It is something. Dismissing it as 'not groundbreaking' is missing the forest for the trees.
What is the magic solution that will make people migrate? Non-image-based mainstream Linux distros, like Ubuntu, tend to be stable and don’t randomly break. Random breakage happens in Ubuntu, but it also happens in Windows, and probably in those image-based distros as well.
Ubuntu is basically windows. I can give you that it is stable, but if you are actually arguing that there is not difference between those ( no 'magic solution' ) edit: , then I don't buy the argument. I think you may be missing the point I was making.
edit: I re-read my previous post. It is possible it is not clear, there is a level of ease and stability that comes 'image based' distros. I am putting quotation marks, because I am almost wondering if this is the equivalent of leather warm seats in the car. You don't think you need it or want it, because car warms up just fine so its not needed. And yet.. when you try use it once, you are hooked.
Do you have any solid sources for the "huge swath" of people being enabled by this to migrate from Windows to Linux?
The only thing that will enable people to migrate is third-party app support; no matter how good Linux distros get it's all moot if the software users use every day doesn't support it.
No. Source is me. I am the anecdata. shrug It absolutely can be wrong, but to me the pattern is relatively clean. Most of the converts I have seen thus far were Windows holdouts.
Don’t worry. These immutable distros break in completely new and unexpected ways, especially since a lot of programs don’t quite gel with it or with the flatpak stuff (e.g. mdns still not really supported)
Part of the same project as Bazzite (Universal Blue) so it's just a static Fedora with some added programs and bash scripts.
"Aurora is a paradigm shift for Linux." "Dream about the stars" "Launch a space rocket" - everything about this, down to the choice of the crudely drawn desktop wallpaper, suggests to me that this was done by very young people. If a few kids want to make themselves a "distro" like this, go for it, just don't advertise it as anything more than a simple pet project, let alone a "paradigm shift".
I think the paradigm shift is/was Fedora Silverblue, OSTree/bootc. Using these immutable distro tools makes it really easy to build your own distributions.
Besides that, IIRC this is based on Fedora, so it stands on the shoulders of over two decades of work on Fedora.
The catch with immutable linux is that it can be hard or undesirable to install some core parts like window managers or docker.
So much better approach is to get most of what you prefer by picking right distro. On the other hand ublue makes it very upproachable to make such distros (even yourself). Thats why there are so many of them.
Maybe. The appeal of distros like these is lost on those who know linux well. If you are new to linux, the difference between Aurora/Bazzite/Bluefin and base fedora (silverblue, kinoite) can be like day and night.
This. In similar vein, buddy just converted few people to bazzite. I think the idea itself is neat ( we are only a step away now from combining that and qubes ). I am on kinoite myself for my ai dedicated box.
I wonder if the unspoken “paradigm” shift is the distribution was vibe coded.
There’s a lot of contradictions on the landing page that would easily be explained by either kids writing it, or someone vibecoding the site.
Such as their claim that updates are a “single iso”, and also their claim about a single App Store, and they then go on to discuss flatpak and homebrew package management.
Or their claim to have redesigned the desktop from the ground up, while boasting they run KDE/Plasma.
And there’s also the claims that it brings something totally new while then going on to describe core Linux features.
Also the scripts running “non intrusively” yet that’s just what you’d expect any seasoned admin to do. This isn’t a headline feature unless you’re new to the game.
Good luck to the guys. I hope they enjoy the exercise. But this is definitely a hobby project cosplaying as a serious distro
I'm not sure where some of these "contradictions" come from, as I e.g. can't find anything about them having "redesigned the desktop" on the page with those keywords. But for the rest, I don't see how they are contradictory - at least if you've spent a few seconds to understand them.
> Such as their claim that updates are a “single iso”
Updates literally are a "single image" (didn't see "iso" mentioned). Where is the contradiction?
> and also their claim about a single App Store, and they then go on to discuss flatpak and homebrew package management.
There literally is a single app store. Homebrew is not used to install apps, only for CLI tools. Flatpak is the single app store which users use to install apps (through Bazaar). Where is the contradiction?
> And there’s also the claims that it brings something totally new while then going on to describe core Linux features.
Can you explain what exactly you're referring to?
> Also the scripts running “non intrusively” yet that’s just what you’d expect any seasoned admin to do. This isn’t a headline feature unless you’re new to the game.
This distribution isn't targeted at "seasoned admins", so why wouldn't they mention something relevant to their target group? No contradiction here.
Yeah I was typing from memory on phone. So the citations aren’t going to be verbatim.
> Updates literally are a "single image" (didn't see "iso" mentioned). Where is the contradiction?
Because that’s not how homebrew works. And you can’t have a single image if you’re expecting people to install apps via their multiple different endorsed delivery mechanisms.
> There literally is a single app store. Homebrew is not used to install apps, only for CLI tools. Flatpak is the single app store which users use to install apps (through Bazaar). Where is the contradiction?
Because an App Store is ostensibly just a package manager. I get they’re making a distinction between desktop apps and CLI (homebrew does GUI apps too by the way), but when their emphasis is on “easy” and “one way to do things”, having two different ways to install apps contradicts their mission statement.
If they actually cared about this mission statement AND had half the competence they claim, they’d build a unified UI that supports all use cases rather than expect people to learn those different tools and why it matters that they’re different.
> Can you explain what exactly you're referring to?
“Aurora is a paradigm shift for Linux.
To rethink the Linux Desktop experience from the ground up, we built Aurora on new technology and principles.”
Bazaar, Plasma, homebrew, etc. none of this is unique to Thor distribution.
They also boast about being able to rollback updates. That isn’t new to Linux either. Though I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ve created a smoother default experience here.
> This distribution isn't targeted at "seasoned admins", so why wouldn't they mention something relevant to their target group? No contradiction here.
i didn’t say thy are targeting seasoned admins. I said seasoned admins would take for granted that’s how you’d write that code. So wouldn’t even consider it something to announce.
The only reason you’d announce it would be because you hadn’t worked in this space before and feel a sense of achievement doing the bloody obvious. (And to be clear, I have zero issue with people having projects like these to learn new skills)
Also, I clearly didn’t say “literally everything was a contradiction.”
I am interested who you think this is targeting. Because they do specifically say this is for developers (amongst other people). And the reason they give (VSCode) is a pretty noob argument. If you can’t figure out how to install an IDE then you’re clearly tech savvy enough to be a developer.
the updates being a single image has nothing to do with homebrew. The OS is a single image that gets updated, that 100% the same that every user will get daily or weekly (depending on what branch/stream you are on).
I get that. But my point is if you’ve got 100+ bits of software installed via homebrew and flatpak, then it’s a bit of a stretch to say updates are a single image.
I’m sure there is a reason for their design but the messaging is all over the place. They boast about things that you should expect to happen (like testing packages before releasing - even bleeding edge distros do this) and throw superlatives around with little substance to back them up while quoting pretty run-of-the-mill choices like KDE and VSCode. It leaves an overall impression that the people behind it can’t be taken to seriously.
If that’s unfair then I’m sorry. But it’s their job to convince me that I should trust them with something as important as an OS. It’s not my job to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If that distro is even just half as good as it claims, then they need to seriously redesign the entire landing page to be more focused on what those gains are. And I say this as someone who's ran several open source projects myself and has immense difficulties designing landing pages for them. I know it's a hard thing to get right. In fact I think it's actually harder than creating a new distro.
> Because that’s not how homebrew works. And you can’t have a single image if you’re expecting people to install apps via their multiple different endorsed delivery mechanisms.
As the other poster said, Homebrew has nothing to do with this. Please read up on how the technology works before declaring this a contradiction.
> Because an App Store is ostensibly just a package manager. I get they’re making a distinction between desktop apps and CLI (homebrew does GUI apps too by the way), but when their emphasis is on “easy” and “one way to do things”, having two different ways to install apps contradicts their mission statement.
You don't install the same things using Homebrew and Flatpak. You install apps through Flatpak, and non-apps through Homebrew etc. There aren't two ways to install apps.
Are you referring to "casks" when talking about GUI apps through Homebrew? Is that even supported on Linux?
> If they actually cared about this mission statement AND had half the competence they claim, they’d build a unified UI that supports all use cases rather than expect people to learn those different tools and why it matters that they’re different.
No, you're just arbitrarily asking for them to make changes based on your misunderstandings of the use cases of each tool.
> The only reason you’d announce it would be because you hadn’t worked in this space before and feel a sense of achievement doing the bloody obvious. (And to be clear, I have zero issue with people having projects like these to learn new skills)
No, that's not the only reason, but you're looking at the project with an extremely narrow lense while not spending any time actually looking into the technology and project, so I can understand that it's the only reason you see.
> I am interested who you think this is targeting. Because they do specifically say this is for developers (amongst other people). And the reason they give (VSCode) is a pretty noob argument. If you can’t figure out how to install an IDE then you’re clearly tech savvy enough to be a developer.
If you'd spend 5 seconds reading up on the technology, you could easily steelman a better argument.
> You don't install the same things using Homebrew and Flatpak. You install apps through Flatpak, and non-apps through Homebrew etc. There aren't two ways to install apps.
except from a user perspective there is. You have to first consider what type of app you want, and then search for it using the correct package manager.
As I said, if they had a single UI that managed both flatpak and homebrew, then it would be different. Users shouldn’t need to know which technology was used to download and install a particular package - that's a technical distinction that should be abstracted away by the "App Store".
Now I completely understand why they've taken the approach they have. But they've made a technical decision to fragment the UX while advertising the app store for its simplicity.
> No, you're just arbitrarily asking for them to make changes based on your misunderstandings of the use cases of each tool.
I'm not asking them to make any changes and I definitely do not misunderstand these tools (fun fact: I maintain a few open source projects -- so I'm probably more familiar than most with how brew et al actually work).
I'm simply pointing out how their advertising doesn't gel with the reality of the UX they're providing. It is feedback, not a request nor demand.
But for what it's worth, if they did decide they wanted to look into the possibility or a "single pane of glass" for all app management, then KDE already has a tool that might work here and which already supports pulling from different sources via extensions: Discover (https://apps.kde.org/discover). So it might be worth them taking a look at the viability of use that (again, just feedback, not a request).
> No, that's not the only reason
That’s not a rebuttal. It’s just a contradiction.
> you're looking at the project with an extremely narrow lense
I’m really not. I’m comparing it against my 30 years of professional experience with Linux (and UNIX as a whole) administration and highlighting areas where their docs are coming across as amateurish.
I’m open to being proven there there is more going on than appears, but your replies amount to “you’re wrong” without actually providing any detail why.
I run Linux workstations and because I don't get paid for keeping my workstation up to date, I do look for something that's as low-effort to maintain as possible. So it's quite possible I'm the target audience for Aurora. But the project does such a poor job of explaining why I should use this instead of any of the hundreds of other distros.
This isn't me being narrow-minded because, as I said elsewhere, it's their job to convince me that I can trust them with my hardware and my sensitive data. And their site, in it's current state, doesn't do a good job of that. In it's current state, it feels like it's being managed by people who don't have a whole lot of experience in this field.
But as I also said elsewhere, I know better than most just how hard it is to get a landing page right for a project as complex as an OS. So I'm being critical from a place of empathy rather than dismissiveness.
> If you'd spend 5 seconds reading up on the technology, you could easily steelman a better argument.
I was asking you a question. There’s no need to be confrontational with me.
1) using KDE and saying this is for developers is a little strange for me considering VS Code has issues with Kdewallet 6. Has this distro done anything about that?
2) Including homebrew in a Linux distro is a criminal offense normally punished by public flogging.
Sorry, RAM is too expensive these days to run two instances of Chrome on the same system. Maybe the time has come for some VC-backed startup to start a rent-seeking business for streaming your development environment from the cloud?
I know there were attempts for this before but they were just banking on the fact that the average dev env is an absurd collection of hacked together tools that is both fragile and nigh impossible to set up for new devs. Now they have a financial angle as well /s
What I understand as "ultimate workstation" would be a smartphone that once connected by usb-C to a monitor, becomes your computer.
Then, you don't need any other device, hence "ultimate".
Convergence, Samsung Dex, lots have tried but nothing mature yet. Well, Dex is mature but closed-source and Samsung-dependent. On the linux no-android smartphone side of things, hardware is too low-cost and the phone aspects of linux too brittle.
I think it would be nice to have as an option, especially when travelling but I also do think that most people don't really want that and prefer the separate device paradigm.
I don't want to toggle options and stuff when I don't want to be distracted or interrupted with calls or messages, I just leave my smartphone in another room. Sure you could attain the same with some keyboard shortcuts but you are pretty sure to sometimes forget to do it while not bringing your phone with you is inconscious and always work.
Android 16 is adding "Desktop Mode" to do exactly this, I bet in a few Android releases this will be good enough for most "desktop usecases". They'll have a "Linux" app that gives you a VM exactly like WSL2 on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS.
If we allow ourselves to dream it's not impossible we'll be able to run Windows games on Android in some future :)
Sure, but that's moving the goalpost from the comment I was replying to. And generally people are fine with using proprietary systems. MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android are all popular compared to "Linux desktop". I would appreciate a desktop mode for my phone even if it isn't 100% FOSS.
While this is the direction many are going for particular use-cases (IoT in particular), I am very much conflicted.
Yes, inconsistent updates between components have caused a couple of nights of fixing my RPM or DEB based systems in my 27 years of using Linux on desktop (but mostly when I mixed sources of packages).
But at the same time, the modern systems thinking is to decouple things to be able to update and upgrade independently. Think distributed systems like web applications. This needs a change in developing components, but once internalized, both improves and speeds up the delivery.
So with traditional Linux distributions already being a mix (small packaged upgrades, but released as a collection - a "release" or "version" of a distribution), this decidedly moves in the other direction.
How does a security fix get quickly applied here? Can one do kernel livepatching? How do you quickly update a component depended on by everything else?
When scrolling down I noticed that Aurora is based on Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/), a initiative to create Linux distributions based on the same containerization tech which sits behind the likes of Docker and Podman.
You might find some extensive answers to your questions in the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora and other Universal Blue distributions, like the increasingly popular distribution Bazzite for Linux based gaming.
I tried Fedora Atomic for a while and my takeaway from image-based distro is that they would work fine for fixed workflow, but you take an hit to versatility. The biggest pain point for me was Emacs. It’s one of the major hub in my computing experience and having workflows strewn across containers doesn’t help.
I personally run Fedora Kinoite (the KDE equivalent of Fedora Silveblue) and Emacs works fine for me. I ended up installing it as a sysext[0] and it works just fine. I did also use it at one point both in a toolbox container and a flatpak, but it always felt a bit flaky there.
But honestly, since Emacs is so core to my personal workflow, I think that it's fine to use a system extension for it. Alternatively it could be layered on, which would also of course work. After that, interacting with the containers is of course just using TRAMP to "connect" to them, and that of course works just fine.
It’s not really about emacs, but the fact that it relies on software being available on $PATH. You could use proxy scripts for stuff that are in containers, but yeah, it’s flaky.
I’ve not encountered OS crashes for a long time, and I’m fairly confident on troubleshooting config issues. Image based OS could be fine for single purpose computing, but I tinker a lot on my PC. Anything that is declarative is usually an hassle.
> Yes, inconsistent updates between components have caused a couple of nights of fixing my RPM or DEB based systems in my 27 years of using Linux on desktop (but mostly when I mixed sources of packages).
Exactly this. I think I have spent something like 2 hours fixing such issues in the last 15 years.
I don't get it when people say "at least with X I don't need to reformat and reinstall my whole system every year", or "it keeps breaking". I have used Debian, Arch, Alpine and Gentoo, and I really just don't have problems? Lucky me, I guess.
Genuinely interested: did the distro break "on its own", or was it due to something you did? Not trying to suggest you are incompetent: maybe "doing it right" is not intuitive, and that's an issue. But I wonder which distro publishes changes that they call "stable" and just break things. Or worse get to the point where it requires a complete reinstall every year...
For instance, by installing stuff on the system with "sudo make install" that breaks the expectations of the system package manager, or by modifying config files and then not handling the merge conflict during the update, or stuff like this?
Very, very long ago I remember having to reinstall some nvidia drivers once in a while (but while annoying it took minutes), and I haven't used nvidia since then.
Plus most of the things that are prone to breakage aren't a part of Flathub anyway. KDE Plasma's sddm and launcher were what kept breaking due to broken updates in Fedora KDE the last time I tried it; Aurora won't be immune from that since none of them are updated via flatpak.
I suspect that the "image-based" strategy taken here is unlikely to be appealing to many members of this community.
It could be very effective for bringing in those who are not particularly computer literate under the claimed guarantee that a random update is unlikely to break the machine. But you would also need significant financial backing and marketing with strong brand recognition to inspire that kind of confidence.
I think the right way to do this is with snapshots, the way opensuse microos is doing it, for example. You get the best of both worlds that way - you still can easily install packages into the OS to customise it, and you do get painless updates and rollbacks. There's a very narrow use case where you _do_ want images, but for that you'll want to control the complete secure boot chain for attestation, so I'd dismiss it here.
Fun fact, a bit over a decade ago we were probably the first one ever to publish a distribution to rely on btrfs snapshots per default with the Jolla phone. Sadly that did bite us due to reliability of btrfs at the time, and later phones switched to ext4, but with a stable filesystem it's a nice mechanism for handling updates and factory reset.
I would think of my self as atleast computer literate and i very much prefer atomic linux to traditional distros, arch or nixos. If you are in luck with hardware - you get system that is hard to polute with my actions and everything developer i do in separate distrobox. Rolling back versions or even hoping to completely different immutable distro is just restart away. I've never been so peaceful with linux.
I've been using this for roughly a year on my work machine. I love the automatic updates: flatpak, brew and the system image get updated automatically. Usually once a week I get the stable update. I don't have to care because it's just a reboot (same for major updates, e.g. Fedora 42 -> 43). I love this.
I had to do some workarounds, but not too much. I mostly work with Firefox, kubectl, k9s, helix and occasionally VSCode (either venv or in a devcontainer).
The project at a glance looks interesting, but it's difficult to tell what the target audience is. It doesn't help that the "About" link (which is actually a button) doesn't seem to take you anywhere.
As others have mentioned, would love a more thorough overview and/or a "who is this for".
Just like the recent Bazzite post, this page is full of buzzwords, but fails to explain what it actually is. It’s an image-based Linux distro. Which is nothing groundbreaking, and a solution looking for a problem, because classic Linux distros just work.
> Aurora is nothing more than a collection of bash scripts, containerfiles and custom programs stitched together.
That sentence appearing on the same page as "rock-solid" is not very convincing either and does not instil confidence.
I want to offer a counter perspective. While the idea is simple and technically not new, it is implemented in a way that allows a huge swath of people to migrate from windows relatively painlessly. It is something. Dismissing it as 'not groundbreaking' is missing the forest for the trees.
What is the magic solution that will make people migrate? Non-image-based mainstream Linux distros, like Ubuntu, tend to be stable and don’t randomly break. Random breakage happens in Ubuntu, but it also happens in Windows, and probably in those image-based distros as well.
Ubuntu is basically windows. I can give you that it is stable, but if you are actually arguing that there is not difference between those ( no 'magic solution' ) edit: , then I don't buy the argument. I think you may be missing the point I was making.
edit: I re-read my previous post. It is possible it is not clear, there is a level of ease and stability that comes 'image based' distros. I am putting quotation marks, because I am almost wondering if this is the equivalent of leather warm seats in the car. You don't think you need it or want it, because car warms up just fine so its not needed. And yet.. when you try use it once, you are hooked.
Do you have any solid sources for the "huge swath" of people being enabled by this to migrate from Windows to Linux?
The only thing that will enable people to migrate is third-party app support; no matter how good Linux distros get it's all moot if the software users use every day doesn't support it.
No. Source is me. I am the anecdata. shrug It absolutely can be wrong, but to me the pattern is relatively clean. Most of the converts I have seen thus far were Windows holdouts.
I don't know about that. I had plenty of stuff break randomly when updating Ubuntu so I can see the appeal.
Don’t worry. These immutable distros break in completely new and unexpected ways, especially since a lot of programs don’t quite gel with it or with the flatpak stuff (e.g. mdns still not really supported)
I ran Silverblue for a while, but you can still have your mutable distributions on top through toolbox or distrobox.
Which bring their own issues. The compromises may or may not be worth it.
Part of the same project as Bazzite (Universal Blue) so it's just a static Fedora with some added programs and bash scripts.
"Aurora is a paradigm shift for Linux." "Dream about the stars" "Launch a space rocket" - everything about this, down to the choice of the crudely drawn desktop wallpaper, suggests to me that this was done by very young people. If a few kids want to make themselves a "distro" like this, go for it, just don't advertise it as anything more than a simple pet project, let alone a "paradigm shift".
I think the paradigm shift is/was Fedora Silverblue, OSTree/bootc. Using these immutable distro tools makes it really easy to build your own distributions.
Besides that, IIRC this is based on Fedora, so it stands on the shoulders of over two decades of work on Fedora.
> Besides that, IIRC this is based on Fedora, so it stands on the shoulders of over two decades of work on Fedora.
Surely I'd use Fedora Silverblue if I wanted an immutable Fedora.
The catch with immutable linux is that it can be hard or undesirable to install some core parts like window managers or docker.
So much better approach is to get most of what you prefer by picking right distro. On the other hand ublue makes it very upproachable to make such distros (even yourself). Thats why there are so many of them.
Maybe. The appeal of distros like these is lost on those who know linux well. If you are new to linux, the difference between Aurora/Bazzite/Bluefin and base fedora (silverblue, kinoite) can be like day and night.
This. In similar vein, buddy just converted few people to bazzite. I think the idea itself is neat ( we are only a step away now from combining that and qubes ). I am on kinoite myself for my ai dedicated box.
> Launch a space rocket
I looked at their website and found no DISA STIG documents. I wonder what jurisdiction they’re planning on launching space rockets from?
Yeah, I do see what you mean.
I wonder if the unspoken “paradigm” shift is the distribution was vibe coded.
There’s a lot of contradictions on the landing page that would easily be explained by either kids writing it, or someone vibecoding the site.
Such as their claim that updates are a “single iso”, and also their claim about a single App Store, and they then go on to discuss flatpak and homebrew package management.
Or their claim to have redesigned the desktop from the ground up, while boasting they run KDE/Plasma.
And there’s also the claims that it brings something totally new while then going on to describe core Linux features.
Also the scripts running “non intrusively” yet that’s just what you’d expect any seasoned admin to do. This isn’t a headline feature unless you’re new to the game.
Good luck to the guys. I hope they enjoy the exercise. But this is definitely a hobby project cosplaying as a serious distro
I'm not sure where some of these "contradictions" come from, as I e.g. can't find anything about them having "redesigned the desktop" on the page with those keywords. But for the rest, I don't see how they are contradictory - at least if you've spent a few seconds to understand them.
> Such as their claim that updates are a “single iso”
Updates literally are a "single image" (didn't see "iso" mentioned). Where is the contradiction?
> and also their claim about a single App Store, and they then go on to discuss flatpak and homebrew package management.
There literally is a single app store. Homebrew is not used to install apps, only for CLI tools. Flatpak is the single app store which users use to install apps (through Bazaar). Where is the contradiction?
> And there’s also the claims that it brings something totally new while then going on to describe core Linux features.
Can you explain what exactly you're referring to?
> Also the scripts running “non intrusively” yet that’s just what you’d expect any seasoned admin to do. This isn’t a headline feature unless you’re new to the game.
This distribution isn't targeted at "seasoned admins", so why wouldn't they mention something relevant to their target group? No contradiction here.
> on the page with those keywords
Yeah I was typing from memory on phone. So the citations aren’t going to be verbatim.
> Updates literally are a "single image" (didn't see "iso" mentioned). Where is the contradiction?
Because that’s not how homebrew works. And you can’t have a single image if you’re expecting people to install apps via their multiple different endorsed delivery mechanisms.
> There literally is a single app store. Homebrew is not used to install apps, only for CLI tools. Flatpak is the single app store which users use to install apps (through Bazaar). Where is the contradiction?
Because an App Store is ostensibly just a package manager. I get they’re making a distinction between desktop apps and CLI (homebrew does GUI apps too by the way), but when their emphasis is on “easy” and “one way to do things”, having two different ways to install apps contradicts their mission statement.
If they actually cared about this mission statement AND had half the competence they claim, they’d build a unified UI that supports all use cases rather than expect people to learn those different tools and why it matters that they’re different.
> Can you explain what exactly you're referring to?
“Aurora is a paradigm shift for Linux. To rethink the Linux Desktop experience from the ground up, we built Aurora on new technology and principles.”
Bazaar, Plasma, homebrew, etc. none of this is unique to Thor distribution.
They also boast about being able to rollback updates. That isn’t new to Linux either. Though I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ve created a smoother default experience here.
> This distribution isn't targeted at "seasoned admins", so why wouldn't they mention something relevant to their target group? No contradiction here.
i didn’t say thy are targeting seasoned admins. I said seasoned admins would take for granted that’s how you’d write that code. So wouldn’t even consider it something to announce.
The only reason you’d announce it would be because you hadn’t worked in this space before and feel a sense of achievement doing the bloody obvious. (And to be clear, I have zero issue with people having projects like these to learn new skills)
Also, I clearly didn’t say “literally everything was a contradiction.”
I am interested who you think this is targeting. Because they do specifically say this is for developers (amongst other people). And the reason they give (VSCode) is a pretty noob argument. If you can’t figure out how to install an IDE then you’re clearly tech savvy enough to be a developer.
the updates being a single image has nothing to do with homebrew. The OS is a single image that gets updated, that 100% the same that every user will get daily or weekly (depending on what branch/stream you are on).
Homebrew or flatpaks don't pollute the base image
I get that. But my point is if you’ve got 100+ bits of software installed via homebrew and flatpak, then it’s a bit of a stretch to say updates are a single image.
I’m sure there is a reason for their design but the messaging is all over the place. They boast about things that you should expect to happen (like testing packages before releasing - even bleeding edge distros do this) and throw superlatives around with little substance to back them up while quoting pretty run-of-the-mill choices like KDE and VSCode. It leaves an overall impression that the people behind it can’t be taken to seriously.
If that’s unfair then I’m sorry. But it’s their job to convince me that I should trust them with something as important as an OS. It’s not my job to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If that distro is even just half as good as it claims, then they need to seriously redesign the entire landing page to be more focused on what those gains are. And I say this as someone who's ran several open source projects myself and has immense difficulties designing landing pages for them. I know it's a hard thing to get right. In fact I think it's actually harder than creating a new distro.
> Because that’s not how homebrew works. And you can’t have a single image if you’re expecting people to install apps via their multiple different endorsed delivery mechanisms.
As the other poster said, Homebrew has nothing to do with this. Please read up on how the technology works before declaring this a contradiction.
> Because an App Store is ostensibly just a package manager. I get they’re making a distinction between desktop apps and CLI (homebrew does GUI apps too by the way), but when their emphasis is on “easy” and “one way to do things”, having two different ways to install apps contradicts their mission statement.
You don't install the same things using Homebrew and Flatpak. You install apps through Flatpak, and non-apps through Homebrew etc. There aren't two ways to install apps.
Are you referring to "casks" when talking about GUI apps through Homebrew? Is that even supported on Linux?
> If they actually cared about this mission statement AND had half the competence they claim, they’d build a unified UI that supports all use cases rather than expect people to learn those different tools and why it matters that they’re different.
No, you're just arbitrarily asking for them to make changes based on your misunderstandings of the use cases of each tool.
> The only reason you’d announce it would be because you hadn’t worked in this space before and feel a sense of achievement doing the bloody obvious. (And to be clear, I have zero issue with people having projects like these to learn new skills)
No, that's not the only reason, but you're looking at the project with an extremely narrow lense while not spending any time actually looking into the technology and project, so I can understand that it's the only reason you see.
> I am interested who you think this is targeting. Because they do specifically say this is for developers (amongst other people). And the reason they give (VSCode) is a pretty noob argument. If you can’t figure out how to install an IDE then you’re clearly tech savvy enough to be a developer.
If you'd spend 5 seconds reading up on the technology, you could easily steelman a better argument.
> You don't install the same things using Homebrew and Flatpak. You install apps through Flatpak, and non-apps through Homebrew etc. There aren't two ways to install apps.
except from a user perspective there is. You have to first consider what type of app you want, and then search for it using the correct package manager.
As I said, if they had a single UI that managed both flatpak and homebrew, then it would be different. Users shouldn’t need to know which technology was used to download and install a particular package - that's a technical distinction that should be abstracted away by the "App Store".
Now I completely understand why they've taken the approach they have. But they've made a technical decision to fragment the UX while advertising the app store for its simplicity.
> No, you're just arbitrarily asking for them to make changes based on your misunderstandings of the use cases of each tool.
I'm not asking them to make any changes and I definitely do not misunderstand these tools (fun fact: I maintain a few open source projects -- so I'm probably more familiar than most with how brew et al actually work).
I'm simply pointing out how their advertising doesn't gel with the reality of the UX they're providing. It is feedback, not a request nor demand.
But for what it's worth, if they did decide they wanted to look into the possibility or a "single pane of glass" for all app management, then KDE already has a tool that might work here and which already supports pulling from different sources via extensions: Discover (https://apps.kde.org/discover). So it might be worth them taking a look at the viability of use that (again, just feedback, not a request).
> No, that's not the only reason
That’s not a rebuttal. It’s just a contradiction.
> you're looking at the project with an extremely narrow lense
I’m really not. I’m comparing it against my 30 years of professional experience with Linux (and UNIX as a whole) administration and highlighting areas where their docs are coming across as amateurish.
I’m open to being proven there there is more going on than appears, but your replies amount to “you’re wrong” without actually providing any detail why.
I run Linux workstations and because I don't get paid for keeping my workstation up to date, I do look for something that's as low-effort to maintain as possible. So it's quite possible I'm the target audience for Aurora. But the project does such a poor job of explaining why I should use this instead of any of the hundreds of other distros.
This isn't me being narrow-minded because, as I said elsewhere, it's their job to convince me that I can trust them with my hardware and my sensitive data. And their site, in it's current state, doesn't do a good job of that. In it's current state, it feels like it's being managed by people who don't have a whole lot of experience in this field.
But as I also said elsewhere, I know better than most just how hard it is to get a landing page right for a project as complex as an OS. So I'm being critical from a place of empathy rather than dismissiveness.
> If you'd spend 5 seconds reading up on the technology, you could easily steelman a better argument.
I was asking you a question. There’s no need to be confrontational with me.
1) using KDE and saying this is for developers is a little strange for me considering VS Code has issues with Kdewallet 6. Has this distro done anything about that?
2) Including homebrew in a Linux distro is a criminal offense normally punished by public flogging.
What issues does vscode have? I haven't noticed anything, although my vscode usage is pretty minimal.
Homebrew is great and we will be using it a lot more in the future.
Homebrew is three racoons in a trenchcoat pretending to be a packaging system. It is also a supply chain disaster waiting to happen.
It's just about installing `gnome-keyring` if you're running VS Code on KDE, right?
Real developers don’t use vscode /another-personal-opinion
Real developers don’t use a graphical desktop /s
Real developers use whatever the fuck they want as long as it gets the job done.
Note the “/s”.
That only works on reddit, this is aiming to be a place for insightful comments and fruitful discussion
Sorry, RAM is too expensive these days to run two instances of Chrome on the same system. Maybe the time has come for some VC-backed startup to start a rent-seeking business for streaming your development environment from the cloud?
I know there were attempts for this before but they were just banking on the fact that the average dev env is an absurd collection of hacked together tools that is both fragile and nigh impossible to set up for new devs. Now they have a financial angle as well /s
https://github.dev It's already here, GitHub isn't the only ones.
what? these threads are always so full of one single anecdotal experience being projected as a global/universal gotcha
What I understand as "ultimate workstation" would be a smartphone that once connected by usb-C to a monitor, becomes your computer.
Then, you don't need any other device, hence "ultimate".
Convergence, Samsung Dex, lots have tried but nothing mature yet. Well, Dex is mature but closed-source and Samsung-dependent. On the linux no-android smartphone side of things, hardware is too low-cost and the phone aspects of linux too brittle.
Aurora is just a new distro...
I think it would be nice to have as an option, especially when travelling but I also do think that most people don't really want that and prefer the separate device paradigm.
I don't want to toggle options and stuff when I don't want to be distracted or interrupted with calls or messages, I just leave my smartphone in another room. Sure you could attain the same with some keyboard shortcuts but you are pretty sure to sometimes forget to do it while not bringing your phone with you is inconscious and always work.
Android 16 is adding "Desktop Mode" to do exactly this, I bet in a few Android releases this will be good enough for most "desktop usecases". They'll have a "Linux" app that gives you a VM exactly like WSL2 on Windows or Crostini on ChromeOS.
If we allow ourselves to dream it's not impossible we'll be able to run Windows games on Android in some future :)
First Android would have to be free software and not project controlled by Google. We need independent mobile phone operating system.
Sure, but that's moving the goalpost from the comment I was replying to. And generally people are fine with using proprietary systems. MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android are all popular compared to "Linux desktop". I would appreciate a desktop mode for my phone even if it isn't 100% FOSS.
> Image based is the future.
While this is the direction many are going for particular use-cases (IoT in particular), I am very much conflicted.
Yes, inconsistent updates between components have caused a couple of nights of fixing my RPM or DEB based systems in my 27 years of using Linux on desktop (but mostly when I mixed sources of packages).
But at the same time, the modern systems thinking is to decouple things to be able to update and upgrade independently. Think distributed systems like web applications. This needs a change in developing components, but once internalized, both improves and speeds up the delivery.
So with traditional Linux distributions already being a mix (small packaged upgrades, but released as a collection - a "release" or "version" of a distribution), this decidedly moves in the other direction.
How does a security fix get quickly applied here? Can one do kernel livepatching? How do you quickly update a component depended on by everything else?
When scrolling down I noticed that Aurora is based on Universal Blue (https://universal-blue.org/), a initiative to create Linux distributions based on the same containerization tech which sits behind the likes of Docker and Podman.
You might find some extensive answers to your questions in the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora and other Universal Blue distributions, like the increasingly popular distribution Bazzite for Linux based gaming.
https://bootc-dev.github.io/bootc/
I tried Fedora Atomic for a while and my takeaway from image-based distro is that they would work fine for fixed workflow, but you take an hit to versatility. The biggest pain point for me was Emacs. It’s one of the major hub in my computing experience and having workflows strewn across containers doesn’t help.
I personally run Fedora Kinoite (the KDE equivalent of Fedora Silveblue) and Emacs works fine for me. I ended up installing it as a sysext[0] and it works just fine. I did also use it at one point both in a toolbox container and a flatpak, but it always felt a bit flaky there.
But honestly, since Emacs is so core to my personal workflow, I think that it's fine to use a system extension for it. Alternatively it could be layered on, which would also of course work. After that, interacting with the containers is of course just using TRAMP to "connect" to them, and that of course works just fine.
[0]: <https://github.com/fedora-sysexts/fedora> & <https://fedora-sysexts.github.io/fedora/>
It’s not really about emacs, but the fact that it relies on software being available on $PATH. You could use proxy scripts for stuff that are in containers, but yeah, it’s flaky.
I’ve not encountered OS crashes for a long time, and I’m fairly confident on troubleshooting config issues. Image based OS could be fine for single purpose computing, but I tinker a lot on my PC. Anything that is declarative is usually an hassle.
> Yes, inconsistent updates between components have caused a couple of nights of fixing my RPM or DEB based systems in my 27 years of using Linux on desktop (but mostly when I mixed sources of packages).
Exactly this. I think I have spent something like 2 hours fixing such issues in the last 15 years.
I don't get it when people say "at least with X I don't need to reformat and reinstall my whole system every year", or "it keeps breaking". I have used Debian, Arch, Alpine and Gentoo, and I really just don't have problems? Lucky me, I guess.
I have been a lot less lucky
Genuinely interested: did the distro break "on its own", or was it due to something you did? Not trying to suggest you are incompetent: maybe "doing it right" is not intuitive, and that's an issue. But I wonder which distro publishes changes that they call "stable" and just break things. Or worse get to the point where it requires a complete reinstall every year...
For instance, by installing stuff on the system with "sudo make install" that breaks the expectations of the system package manager, or by modifying config files and then not handling the merge conflict during the update, or stuff like this?
Very, very long ago I remember having to reinstall some nvidia drivers once in a while (but while annoying it took minutes), and I haven't used nvidia since then.
Plus most of the things that are prone to breakage aren't a part of Flathub anyway. KDE Plasma's sddm and launcher were what kept breaking due to broken updates in Fedora KDE the last time I tried it; Aurora won't be immune from that since none of them are updated via flatpak.
I suspect that the "image-based" strategy taken here is unlikely to be appealing to many members of this community.
It could be very effective for bringing in those who are not particularly computer literate under the claimed guarantee that a random update is unlikely to break the machine. But you would also need significant financial backing and marketing with strong brand recognition to inspire that kind of confidence.
I think the right way to do this is with snapshots, the way opensuse microos is doing it, for example. You get the best of both worlds that way - you still can easily install packages into the OS to customise it, and you do get painless updates and rollbacks. There's a very narrow use case where you _do_ want images, but for that you'll want to control the complete secure boot chain for attestation, so I'd dismiss it here.
Fun fact, a bit over a decade ago we were probably the first one ever to publish a distribution to rely on btrfs snapshots per default with the Jolla phone. Sadly that did bite us due to reliability of btrfs at the time, and later phones switched to ext4, but with a stable filesystem it's a nice mechanism for handling updates and factory reset.
I would think of my self as atleast computer literate and i very much prefer atomic linux to traditional distros, arch or nixos. If you are in luck with hardware - you get system that is hard to polute with my actions and everything developer i do in separate distrobox. Rolling back versions or even hoping to completely different immutable distro is just restart away. I've never been so peaceful with linux.
I've been using this for roughly a year on my work machine. I love the automatic updates: flatpak, brew and the system image get updated automatically. Usually once a week I get the stable update. I don't have to care because it's just a reboot (same for major updates, e.g. Fedora 42 -> 43). I love this. I had to do some workarounds, but not too much. I mostly work with Firefox, kubectl, k9s, helix and occasionally VSCode (either venv or in a devcontainer).
The project at a glance looks interesting, but it's difficult to tell what the target audience is. It doesn't help that the "About" link (which is actually a button) doesn't seem to take you anywhere.
As others have mentioned, would love a more thorough overview and/or a "who is this for".
Who is this for? Who is the target audience? Mac users/ Windows users?
Website animations are laggy
Unsurprising considering that Bazzite's site has the same issue.
The website won't even fully load for me.
At 6.31GB this distro's ISO is even fatter than Windows's!
None of the points listed in the website are convincing enough to make it an "ultimate workstation"