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!
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?