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One month with the Aeon Desktop: An immutable Linux distribution that uses openSUSE Tumbleweed packages

31 August, 2025 - Categories: Linux - Tags: Aeon, openSUSE, Fedora Silverblue, Distrobox, Toolbx

By Steven Rosenberg

I've had my eye on the Aeon Desktop — an atomic/immutable Linux distribution that is downstream from openSUSE Tumbleweed, and after watching project leader Richard Brown make his pitch in a conference talk, I was ready to go.

I had been running Fedora Silverblue — that project's atomic/immutable flagship ­— from version 38 through 42, a little more than 2 years. That's a lot of ticks in Linux user time. The experience has been solid, but not trouble-free.

During the time I ran Silverblue, I remember a show-stopping bootloader issue that required manual intervention, and numerous infrastructure-related hiccups that kept updates from flowing. At one point I couldn't start certain apps until an update fixed the bug.

In regular Fedora fashion, the issues are usually resolved within two weeks, usually by an update and occasionally with some command-line magic provided by a very helpful community of developers who also use the system every day.

Compared to my past memories/experience with Fedora Workstation, the frequency of bugs in Silverblue was slightly higher but manageable. Even so, I wondered how the immutable competition was shaping up.

Might as well give something else a try. If it's worse, I can always come back — or do what I usually do when things go awry, which is turn to Debian Stable for some rock-solid computing based on time-tested (and old) tech.

In the beginning (or at least in Silverblue 38), one of the reasons I had for starting and sticking with Fedora's immutable offering was the idea that it was/is the future, and Fedora (and by extension Red Hat) was putting not-insignificant resources behind realizing it. I also figured there would be a large, supportive community taking the leap into the atomic/immutable world together.

While I think the overall Fedora Project has a robust "community feel," and I have repeatedly benefited from the help of other experienced users — including many who work at Red Hat — I get the feeling that Silverblue itself is something of a rudderless ship. Sure there are users. I don't know how many. They keep pretty quiet. And I don't hear much about cool new features coming soon to the atomic desktop.

I look at the changes coming for Fedora 43, which releases in November, and I don't see anything about Silverblue. Not one thing.

Meanwhile, Aeon is already doing things I hope Silverblue will do but which don't seem likely to happen in the near (or far) future:

I confess that in all the time I've run Linux and BSD (since 2007), I have never — before now — run an openSUSE-related distro on bare metal for more than an hour. I was going to just say "never, ever" but I found this post from 2008 where I installed openSUSE 10.3 on a free partition on a Debian Lenny-running laptop. I couldn't get Ethernet working in openSUSE, and I soon replaced it with NetBSD. I'm sure NetBSD didn't last very long either, but that's another story.

Fast forward. I gave openSUSE Leap 15 a pretty good tryout on a VM in 2024. It performed very well. This is a solid, stable distro.

So once I heard about Aeon and its promise of an optimized, maintenance-free desktop experience, I was ready to try it.

I freshened up the backups of my user files and got ready to wipe Silverblue.

Once I figured out that the Aeon boot image isn't an .iso or .img but a raw.xz that needs to stay that way (DON'T extract it!!) when using Fedora Media Writer or GNOME Impression to put it on a USB flash drive for booting, I was on my way.

Aeon uses TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2 to manage full disk encryption, but during the super-fast install process, the installer told my my TPM 2 was too old, and I needed to use a passphrase. No problem. I didn't expect much from my 8-year-old HP laptop, so I was fine entering a passphrase. I have been doing that to unlock encrypted partitions for many years, including in Silverblue, so I'm accustomed to the procedure. I did get an image on screen during the install that showed me an unlock key and a QR code in case I forgot the passphrase. I took a picture of it with my phone.

Before I knew it, Aeon was installed, and the system had brought in a minimal set of Flatpaks. I had Firefox, the GNOME Text Editor, two terminals (Console and Ptyxis), Files (aka Nautilus), the Calculator app, Disks, the GNOME System Monitor, the Settings app, Help, and — crucially — the Refine app, which is a Flatpak that does some of the things that GNOME Tweaks used to handle. Ever notice that GNOME Tweaks isn't offered as a Flatpak? Refine fills that gap.

Two things I learned pretty quickly are:

Windows murders Aeon: I have been worried about the impending expiration of Microsoft's Secure Boot signing key, and I hadn't updated the BIOS in this HP laptop in years. This is a task that fwupd doesn't seem to handle on this particular laptop. I could tell that my BIOS was many, many versions behind what HP is now offering. So after a week using Aeon on this two-drive laptop (NVMe for Aeon and SATA SSD for OpenBSD), I removed the SATA drive and put my old Windows HDD drive back in.

I booted Windows. The HP update software didn't work. It suggested that I needed to update Windows.

After TWO WHOLE DAYS of updating the Windows system, with countless reboots and scant information on what was happening at any given time, the HP BIOS/driver update software still didn't work. Instead I went to the HP website, downloaded the .exe to update the BIOS, did that in 5 minutes and was on my way. I could have just put the Windows drive in the laptop, not done ANY updates and run that .exe.

That would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.

Little did I know that putting the Windows 10 SATA drive back into the laptop and doing all of those updates also led to Microsoft erasing something on my totally separate Aeon NVMe drive that prevented it from booting. I didn't ask for that. Nobody asks Windows to fuck with unrelated drives. But it does.

In hindsight, I should have pulled the Aeon drive before mucking around with Windows. But I didn't want to go through the trouble of removing the NVMe. I didn't want to mess with that little screw. Bad decision.

Sad note: I still didn't get a new Microsoft signing key. I hope that Aeon brings this in as a shim. (Is that the right way to say it?)

After Windows killed Aeon, I removed the Windows drive. I had backups of my Aeon user files that were almost up to date. I had missed a couple of changes in two files but was able to re-create them from a secondary backup in one case and Mastodon posts in the other.

My second Aeon install went as quickly and easily as the first. You can literally be up and running in minutes.

I was back in Aeon. So how does it perform?

Aeon has a project leader who says he has made sure the system runs as fast and lean as possible, with exactly the features he wants and can deliver. It's pure install-it-run-it desktop goodness.

It is meant to be a complete Linux desktop in the tradition of Google's ChromeOS in that it updates itself without user intervention. Unlike ChromeOS, with Aeon you can install anything you want from Flatpak (for GUI apps) or Distrobox (for CLI).

Even the Distroboxes are updated automatically. Compare that with whatever you need to do to update Toolboxes in Fedora. I say "whatever you need to do," because I don't think Toolboxes can really be correctly, successfully updated. In Silverblue, I eventually took to periodically deleting all of my Toolbox instances — and the images they were based on — and then re-creating them. In Aeon, I don't have to think about it at all. It's automatic.

I couldn't tell you how Aeon works under the hood. I don't have to know. I don't have to do any fiddling or babysitting. Everything updates all the time.

If an update to Aeon's base system breaks functionality, all you have to do is hold down the space bar after booting, choose an older snapshot and boot from it. There will be another snapshot very soon — and another after that — and pretty soon whatever was broken will be fixed. That's the theory, anyway. So far it has worked for me, though I will admit it's early days.

My second Aeon system has been alive for about a month. I have added all the Flatpaks I need. Everything is working well.

The laptop has never run cooler, quieter or faster.

I recommend using the Ptyxis terminal, which makes it easy to open a Distrobox container. And I also recommend setting up a Distrobox for general use. That's where I added full Vim, htop, the programming environments I'm using at this particular time, and the Zola and Hugo executables I use for building static sites.

Aeon uses packages from openSUSE Tumbleweed, and I've found that the default Distroboxes, which use a Tumbleweed image and repositories, are also of extremely high quality.

It makes me think about running openSUSE, be it Tumbleweed, Slowroll or Leaf, in those cases where I want a traditional Linux distro. Though on the desktop, I can't really see wanting that any more. I like the atomic/immutable way of using Linux, and I expect it to get better and better.

Note: There has been some misunderstanding recently about Aeon and its relationship with SUSE and openSUSE. It's not easy to get this right, and I don't know if my language here is correct:

The project was begun by Richard Brown, who is a current SUSE employee, and it was at one time tied to openSUSE MicroOS and that project's install image. But at this point in its life, Aeon is an independent project with its own governance and installer. Aeon does rely on packages and repositories from openSUSE Tumbleweed but is put together by Brown and his team outside of the purview of the openSUSE mothership. Aeon Desktop purposefully doesn't include openSUSE in its name, and there are guidelines the project abides by regarding logos and branding.

Aeon's installer isn't unusual for its own sake. It uses Richard Brown's tik tool — tik = Tailored Installation Kit — to install the system. One of the features of tik is that in the event that the disk to which you are installing Aeon meets certain conditions (which will be present on disks that already have an Aeon system), the installer (given a large-enough USB flash drive) will copy the old install's user information and user files and re-create them on the new installation. It's a pretty neat trick. I don't know if it's appropriate to call it a "get out of jail free" card, but that's how I'm looking at it. I can only imagine how long it would take to copy my huge amount of user files to the USB drive and back again to the new system, but that's an experiment for another time.

Conclusion: Aeon Desktop is unlike any other OS out there. This atomic/immutable system is built for speed and ease of use, with openSUSE Tumbleweed packages at its core. After a quick install, you add your Flatpaks, and that's it. From a technical and features standpoint, it's far ahead of Fedora Silverblue. And after the install, Aeon basically maintains itself. There is no fiddling. Distrobox is in the default. If you're into distro-hopping, put this one on your "to try" list. And if you want to stick with one OS for some time to come, Aeon has a lot to offer.