Aurora immutable KDE Plasma workstation: Big, slow, and confusing

Aurora, a relatively young distro from Austria, bills itself as "your stable, privacy-respecting and ultimate productivity OS." These are rather bold claims, though many other Linux distros make the same promise. The upstart distro is based on Universal Blue images built from the core technologies of Fedora Atomic. That means …

[cyberdemon]

Oh piss off Liam.. :P

I know how much you hate customisability and configuration options.. You're obviously a Mac user who wants Jesus to tell you how to use your computer..

Well, KDE was built for those of us who already know how we want to use a computer.. And we don't always agree with eachother!

It's also built for those of us who don't know how we want to use a computer, but wish to find out on our own which way is best

[a_foley]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

Hey, at least Jesus (Tim Apple?) gives you sensible UI and UX!

[Grogan]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

With the exception of certain embedded devices, I think immutable systems are silly.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

Those of us trained on Yes Minister recognise it as simply getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

> immutable systems are silly

What about the tens of billions of smartphones and tablets the world's give through by now, then? Or, probably, much more.

Every one immutable.

Every one has better customer acceptance than any desktop Linux. Every one more robust, more fault tolerant, easier and just plain better.

I want a desktop PC as simple and reliable as a telephone. Not a smartphone. As an old dumb wired landline. As simple as a toaster.

We can do so much better than the current fiddly toys.

I absolutely do want fiddly toys for playing with...

But I want better alternatives for my mum and my cousins and my kid.

[dafe]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

> Every one immutable.

That's why jailbreaking exists.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

No. Not having that.

I am all for customisability. THAT IS WHAT I AM COMPLAINING ABOUT.

I want to customise menus. I absolutely demand a global option to disable hamburger menus and CSD, everywhere.

This is a supposedly configurable desktop. Well let me configure it how I want then.

It doesn't. So I am criticising it and will continue to do so.

I want 1 unified start menu, not 40 of them. I want 1 unified plain text editor, by default. I want important options for the taskbar, like the size of the start button and the size of the clock, not stupid pointless ones like whether it floats slightly away from the edge of screen or not.

My point, which you fail to even notice let alone address, is that this is a lie of configurability. It's fake. I want real configurability that matters, not toys like different start buttons.

I want panels that can span screens. It used to do it. It was removed. It was too hard. Well tough. Man up and fix it.

I want title bars on the left, like in wm2. That was removed too.

I want tabbed windows like in BeOS.

I do not like the desktop. But I used to love it. KDE 1.x was the absolutely bees' knees. It was head and shoulders above the rest.

Since then, all it's got is more chrome, more bling, while key important functionality is taken away. What's left is not satisfactory.

It may be for you and good for you.

But you do NOT get to lecture me about having customisability when I'm complaining that there isn't enough.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

Where's your PR then?

[cameronbosch]

Not sure I agree with you here

I disagree with most of this article.

I'll say as many times as I need to: I've never had any issues with Btrfs because of corruption, and I do like snapshotting functionality. Also, OsTree has its advantages. Most users will be just fine with Aurora or Bazzite. And if you're not, then don't worry, there's always Arch or Debian to scratch that itch of tinkering. And I'm in that camp, but I can definitely see immutable distros' value.

Also, Apple's software edge has fallen off a cliff for years now. It's honestly worse than GNOME in many ways now, and I'm not a fan of the GNOME workflow. Need I mention Liquid Glass?

That being said, the dual boot issues are something they should fix. But couldn't you make a new EFI partition for the distro and install that bootloader there?

Overall, my dad uses Aurora on his (formerly my) Dell XPS laptop. He barely can tell the difference from Windows, which he barely uses. (He just uses it Zoom & Ungoogled Chromium.)

[osxtra]

All Twisted Up

After investigating Aurora, famed Linux researcher David Bowman was said to report: "My God, it's full of knobs!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Are those people nuts ?

[quote]Immutable distros prevent experienced users from installing OS packages in the normal way, so Aurora provides Distrobox, which we looked at a while ago, to provide a choice of familiar Linux environments running in containers, with the DistroShelf GUI wrapper to make it easier.[/quote]

Why not simply allow me to play with Linux and packages in the normal way ? Why would I want a Linux distro that acts against me like my mobile phone ?

Every time someone deposes you from some of your freedom, he is not doing it for your own good.

If your aunt Mary doesn't want the complexity of Linux, why would she care about the OS running on her device ?

[a_foley]

Re: Are those people nuts ?

"Why not simply allow me to play with Linux and packages in the normal way ? Why would I want a Linux distro that acts against me like my mobile phone ?"

Because it's all about security, which is why immutable distributions are appealing - you can't fsck up your core system with malware if it's read-only.

[CajunMoses]

Then There's Kinoite

I tried Aurora. I didn't need the extras that certainly add value for some but amounted to clutter for me. So I'm running Kinoite now. But I didn't find Aurora to be slow or inconsistent in design. Most importantly, I didn't find it to perform poorly in day-to-day use in any way. That should really be the bottom line. Atomic distros live in a realm of reliability and security that's vastly greater than that of mutable distros. I find that people who whine about atomic distros are just set in their ways and averse to anything slightly unfamiliar. Mobile phones are atomic, and nobody complains. Same with Chromebooks. Ultimately, very, very, very few people actually have a genuine need for access to core OS files for any purpose other than to "tinker." If you have a tinkering addiction, use any mutable distro like Ubuntu.

[corb]

Re: Then There's Kinoite

I complain *a lot* about my phone.

There are adjustments and tweaks I need and want to make to a Linux desktop. I've tried immutable systems. They add unnecessary complexity and a learning curve with little or no payoff, while removing or obscuring my ability to make my preferred adjustments.

If I was responsible for a building full of Linux desktops I might have a different opinion. But, I'm not.

[CajunMoses]

rpm-ostree is pretty easy

The criticism of rpm-ostree is grossly unfair. Aurora has rpm-ostree because its part of Kinoite. For users, it's basically the Fedora Atomic equivalent of 'apt' or 'dnf', etc. There's nothing "complex" about it. It's an old technology that Fedora is replacing over time with bootc. Using rpm-ostree to "layer" applications is frowned upon not only because layered applications can potentially introduce update conflicts but also because using rpm-ostree is almost always unnecessary in a distro like Kinoite which is built for running distro containers. So if you absolutely cannot find the application that you need as a FlatPak or AppImage, just create the container that's native to the application and install the application package from within that container. Then, exit the container and the application will appear in the start menu.