19 days ago I announced my plans here on Lemmy and after four weeks and ~300 hours in total, I can finally share the first ISO of my project with this community. “sometime next week” yeah that was optimistic lmao I want to thank you again for the feedback on the initial announcement and I can say I tried my best to address and implement a lot of your suggestions!
For the people that haven’t read the last post, this is the basic gist of it:
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Plutonium-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the bleeding-edge Arch repositories and the power of the AUR but all of that with a 5-20% performance boost from a heavily optimized kernel and the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.
For the ISO and the in-depth technical documentation, please visit my website at the link in the title!
The 0.0.1 version is a pre-release/in-development version meant for experienced people interested in this project. I tested it extensively and I’m running it for a few days now on my Thinkpad myself, however I can IN NO WAY guarantee that this is 100% viable to daily-drive just yet.
I’m very thankful for every person that considers testing this distro in a VM or on a secondary PC to contribute to the development of this project. Any feedback is appreciated and I hope my work can be of value to you!
Edit: from the feedback that was pm’d to me so far it seems like it’s working fine when it’s running but two people had issues with the hardware detection during the install. If you are experiencing a similar issue, please send me your hardware specs and the output of the log where it failed and I’ll be able to make it more robust!
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager
Direct pacman use is blocked. /usr/bin/pacman is a wrapper around pacman-real
Regardless, I do support attempts to make an immutable and declarative Arch distro. An an ostree implementation on Arch is an interesting experiment. You might want to check out Darch which boots from container images.
Interesting, thank you for that link! I was also thinking about bootc as a candidate but that seemed unintuitive to me so I went with ostree for now. The current implementation needs some refining but definitely is a better start that I imagined, quite happy how it turned out.
Regarding the quotes, I’m brainstorming if there’s a way to, I wanna say “re-route” the pacman commands to edit the package list so you use the pacman commands like usual but they get applied as if you use the gui. It’s definitely possible but I’m thinking about how to get that to actually work in a clean way.
My intention behind that statement is that you aren’t forced to use say flatpaks only and under the hood the update mechanism is still pacman even tho you don’t call it directly, does that make sense?
A distro in just 300 hours? is it artisan coded or sloppadoppadoo?
Well, it were four 80 hour weeks and I “only” reverse-engineered the way Fedora makes their distro atomic with ostree but adapted to Arch. I did try to stay true to the Arch philosophy of keeping it minimal otherwise so it wasn’t that big of a project!
Edit: Sometimes I had to spin up Qwen 3.8 27B because the error codes the installer threw out were literally humanly unreadable so I had no clue what even went wrong but other than that it was by hand lmao
LLMs are good for a few things. One of them is parsing human unreadable errors. I approve of this.
I don’t like black and white thinking and while I fucking hate LLMs in general, as 95% of times they are used for all the wrong reasons, I do have an Intel B70 for cases like these where current search engines just lead to nothing.
Incredible lol
not that anything stands a chance anymore but lol, another project that doesn’t care about ever being found by search engine. right up there with “matrix” and “riot”
You are right, I thought about that too late, but if you search it together with “linux” it already shows up!
“peee-ewwww”.
why is it that open source folks have such a difficult time naming things?
If you can provide one without any DE that would be nice
That’s planned! Initially I actually planned to have a desktop selection in Calamares with KDE Plasma, GNOME and no DE, but while I was drafting the package lists for that I decided to push that back for a later release. This first one is more or less supposed to be a proof of concept so features like that are definitely in the works, but deemed overkill for the first version.
Apologizes, not sure if I followed, what makes it atomic?
To put it in simple terms: when you update your system, you will have two deployments. One deployment stays exactly the same, the copy will be updated. Until you restart you stay on the original. When you restart, the system automatically attempts to boot the updated copy. If it fails, it automatically loads the original again.
That way the updates are atomic in the sense that you either boot into a fully updated system or simply back into the untouched original, nothing in between.
Edit: if you look up how Fedora Silverblue works, it’s pretty much the same, just applied to Arch!
The part that I’m a bit confused is this paragraph:
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Plutonium-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the bleeding-edge Arch repositories and the power of the AUR but all of that with a 5-20% performance boost from a heavily optimized kernel and the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.
And then the follow up:
Edit: if you look up how Fedora Silverblue works, it’s pretty much the same, just applied to Arch!
It sounds a bit contradictory. Can we think about Plutonium-239 as of SteamOS that is classic atomic distro and based on Arch or this is more of a case to something like the RakuOS?
Yeah, you are right, I’m not the best at explaining things, I’m sorry. I look at it like literally Arch but the updates are atomic. You can choose to install or uninstall whatever you want, but it gets written with an A/B system during updates so you can always have a fallback. It does come preconfigured from the start, because that was easier to develop for now, but you can treat this like any other Arch install, just with safer updates.
Looks cool, I’ll drop this on my Thinkpad tonight when I get home from work.
I’m excited to hear your feedback! Keep in mind, some things might be buggy, but please notify me and they will be taken care of.
Will do!
Does it come with KDE preinstalled or is that just for the screenshot?
I’d love to give it a try on my secondary laptop as it sounds just great, but I really can’t stand KDE.
Edit: KDE is the only desktop available, but if I understand that correctly alternatives are on the roadmap?
Yes, it does come preinstalled with KDE as implementing a proper desktop selection is planned but would take even more time. This is Arch however, you can uninstall everything you want. Throw KDE out and install whatever desktop enviornment you want, you still keep the kernel and the ostree update model, that’s what’s so cool about it!
