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
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.
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)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
"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".
reply