this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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AuroraLinux any other users? (getaurora.dev)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by node815 to c/[email protected]
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Since around the pandemic, I have been using Arch Linux and KDE Plasma full time and had become completely enamored with it and familiar with the commands and settings. It made it super easy to install almost any app available using Yay or Paru for example to take advantage of the AUR library. I dabbled a bit here and there with other variations of Arch such as ZENArch (Uses the Zen Kernel) and others, my step daughter's PC has EndeavourOS on it. When the immutable craze came out a couple of years back, I tried BlendOS, which was designed to be immutable but found it to be too rough around the edges. I even played around with NixOS a tiny bit and OpenSuse Tumbleweed, which was just is too enterprise centric for me, even though it is for both home and enterprise users. It even seemed a bit slower than Arch as well.

Last week or two sometime, another user posted about a new OS for distrohopping and someone mentioned Aurora Linux which piqued my curiosity. On the 28th of December '24 I took the leap and replaced Arch with Aurora DX (Developer edition), which contains more tools that I use such as VSCode and Docker and other items of that nature by design. I was a bit thrown off with their extended install time where it seemed to be frozen, but I let it process and took a nice coffee break as it were. :) Once the install finished, I rebooted and found my way through the update process and have enjoyed the structure of it and it offers a rolling release which I'm used to for the software. I enabled the auto updater which has made it enjoyable and I don't even realize things have updated to be honest since it's transparently done. Today sometime, KDE released 6.2.4 and within hours my KDE updated to that version. Color me impressed! Yes, Arch could do that as well, but and I often dabbled in their unstable repo's just so I could get the latest Plasma Desktop, which would sometimes take longer than anticipated. I ran into a lot of instability and started to have more issues than I cared for. Yes, I know - that comes with the territory of alpha software and I accepted it! I freely admit too, I became sort of hooked on running the "Yay" command to update my system daily if not multiple times, it was addicting to see the software releases come in.

One of the things about Aurora Linux is it includes "BoxBuddy" which in itself is nothing short of amazing. It tightly integrates various OS's into the terminal where you can install apps which are not found in the os-tree or RPM repositories. This morning, I needed to install scrcpy so I could type through my phone in a chat with a business, and the flatpak version of GUIScrpy refused to see my phone so I tried to install scrcpy but it could not be found. I then fired up an Arch install and installed 'scrcpy' which is really all I wanted and was on my way. Having the ability to graphically run apps, inside of the OS of your choice natively has been nothing short of impressive! While scrpy is not graphical, For testing purposes, I installed "Glabel" which is a Gnome label program and it acted and looked just like it was native to my OS. (There is a flatpak version I installed for the Aurora Linux) which I'm using now for my label printer.

AuroraLinux-DX at least includes kubernetes, podman and docker pre-installed with a desktop management tool for both which is quite nice. I don't really run Docker on my desktop, but this may change. :) (I run Docker on a separate server).

So far, I can honestly say, my system feels quite stable and have not encountered any crashes or issues which have hindered me from staying with it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Aurora Linux to thin day is the only distro that has made me consider giving up my main arch install on my desktop pc, as I enjoy it plenty on my laptop.

[–] lookmomnodrugs 1 points 1 day ago

Interesting read, thanks for sharing. I tried Bazzite recently myself and not because I was hyped for it, but in hopes of advancing a bit in the life long process of getting my sound card (UAD Apollo Twin) working on Linux - I was turned off initially thinking there would be no possibilities of tinkering with other stuff (sound cards not so much) etc but I was pleasantly surprised, when I took some time to actually read about the distro and the teams goals. Since then my journey has continued onto Pop_OS with some actual luck, I did a lot of sysbench for my memory and cpu the other day and after that I ran lsusb just because, not thinking it would give anything else than the usual, a generic device name (Cypress Westbridge) but there it fucking WAS. I just sat there for a while looking at it like... What? I have been through a few distros at this point and now it suddenly works when I am not even trying. Happy. Then... Updates to the system, or I did something else that I should not have aaaaaaaand its gone. Hello generic name my old friend

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Thanks for your experience report!

Yeah man, Aurora (and uBlue in general) is fucking amazing. I'm using it on my laptop, and Bazzite on my gaming PC, which is pretty much almost the same tbh.

Sometimes, people here on Lemmy might think I'm getting paid by someone to make advertisements for uBlue, but it's literally the best distro I tried so far.

It's one of the few distros I would recommend for non-techy people, like my mum or friends.

The only thing I dislike about Aurora in particular is the release schedule of KDE.

Bluefin (Gnome) offers a gts variant, which offers older (and therefore more stable) packages, so you have half a year of extra testing.

~~Sadly, KDE doesn't allow that, so it's more of a rolling release, like you said. Because of that, my experience with Aurora has been a bit worse than Bluefin, but still better than most other distros with KDE imo.~~

EDIT: Dumbass me chose aurora:latest and not aurora:stable, no wonder I constantly got brand new packages. Ignore the last part.

[–] kronarbob 2 points 2 days ago

What I love the most from bazzite team, is their work with distrobox . Install the distribution you love, follow their tutorial, boom, you get access to the AUR, and it has a minimal impact on your system.

Bazzite felt great to me, but too slow on my computer to enjoy it, so I hopped. But still, I love what they do.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

KDE doesn't control what packages are released on a distro? That's Aurora that chooses not to have point releaes version, and instead seems to have a rolling release from your description.

Bluefin GTS is based on Fedora 40 while Bluefin is based on Fedora 41. Fedora doesn't do rolling release outside it's Rawhide rolling dev branch. It does point releases and bug fixes.

There are plenty of KDE based distros that are also point release and not rolling release if that's your preference. I'd also recommend feeding back to Aurora if you think they should alter there KDE release schedule; they chose when to feed KDE releases into their distro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I edited my comment and corrected it. Thanks.

When I had those problems (and constantly new packages), I probably chose latest and not stable.

I think that was the issue.

[–] node815 0 points 2 days ago

I'm not 100% sure on the KDE release cycle, as I understood, the KDE update was full of bug fixes today to the 6.2.4 from 6.2.3, and the Fedora team integrated it in their releases quickly so this might have been a faster than usual release. I'm thinking when KDE fully releases their new OS to replace Neon, I may try that one, it's also supposed to be immutable which would be the chef's kiss for me. :)

[–] Nednarb44 3 points 2 days ago

I use it on my work laptop and recently put it on my Mom's computer (basically a browser machine anyway) as well. So far so good on both. The only thing my mom doesn't like is that the file explorer is called dolphin, she said it's confusing. I plan on using a menu editor to change the name, then all is well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I can’t say much because I don’t use it, but I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

Her use case is simple- immutable, hassle free updates, and some games.

She has no problems with it so far.

I used it a little bit to back up an old hard drive, it’s just what I expected, a simple KDE implementation that isn’t messing about.

But what I really hope it will be is no random breaking that takes the entire system out, (and to be fair to Aeon in that case - Aeon is still in release candidate).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I put it on my partners computer after Aeon crapped itself and put the system in a boot loop until I switched the hard disk out.

It is only release candidate software. As such, I didn't have high expectations. However what you've described here is pretty troublesome. And I'd imagine your partner didn't do crazy stuff that would justify such a reaction by the OS.

I'm personally very interested in the future of openSUSE Aeon. So far, I've mostly seen positive reactions. Therefore, a negative experience as such really piques my interest. If possible, could you elaborate upon what had transpired before the system broke? Or perhaps your partners personal experience with the distro in hindsight.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I used Aeon myself from it being called microOS Desktop Gnome until around August of this year, it had replaced my old Tumbleweed install, and it had been rock solid the entire time. Absolutely loved it.

It was everything I needed up to that point - wayland, automated updates and rollback, the default packages were spot on and super light, network config perfect out of the box (something I always struggle with), flatpak first! I’m a KDE user (well I’m really an Openbox guy but no wayland solution yet), so I suffered gnome for the sake of having a great system. I really like what Richard Brown has achieved, it’s almost perfect.

You suspect right, my partner is not a tech user - Firefox, steam, libre office is pretty much it for her. When she shut down the night before this she had just been uploading photos to her cloud storage.

I believe it was related to the implementation of full disk encryption. As this happened immediately after that policy was changed.

after the ASUS UEFI splash screen; the screen goes black, it flashes up 'Random seed file is too short'.

Then it goes to a prompt:

'Please enter recovery key for disk root-x86-64 (aeon_root): (press tab for no echo)

I found the recovery key in my inbox, and in my partners sent files, as we knew it was probably important so she sent me a copy during installation. But when I put in the recovery key, let it go through the motions, it would restart and come back to this prompt. No amount of retrying the recovery key helped.

I posted the error on the Aeon subreddit but after the recovery key wouldn’t work I just walked away from it. I couldn’t find any other mentions of this error anywhere, and the death of search engines has made this kind of thing difficult to chase down.

With everything going on in our life I couldn’t troubleshoot this, I just needed her system up and I had Aurora ready on a thumbstick already.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That was a great read. Wonderfully detailed. Thank you!

It's a pity that it went down like that. Would you say that a properly matured openSUSE Kalpa would be your perfect setup? Out of curiosity, have you used projects related to Fedora Atomic for long periods of time? If so, how would you compare them?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

My only experience with a Fedora-based distro at all has been Bazzite that I had on a htpc for about 12 months, and the use case doesn’t really let me compare to Aeon. Similar to Aeon though, I had no problems with it during that time.

I had Aurora on a thumbstick because I wanted to try it, but never got around to it.

I was hoping something would happen with Kalpa, but I don’t believe anything will. I think if it was ever there, that with be best for me. I’ve moved to cachy OS mainly because I needed to get certain things working that were only packaged in appimage- BUT I believe I could have worked it out in Aeon by fiddling around with distrobox. I was going to test out Aurora for this and just stumbled into cachy OS instead.

I’m not sure if I would go back to Aeon now, as I’m back on KDE again I don’t think I want to look at gnome for a while.

But for my tastes, I think once there is a mature wayland-based Openbox replacement (eyes on labwc) I’d look around to see which distro works best with that. I’d imagine it could be Tumbleweed but I’d also watch how well it works on something extremely stable maybe Debian-based.

Nothing is getting me really excited about Linux right now, not the way Ubuntu did in the 2000s, or how Crunchbang did, and not the way Tumbleweed did. Which is probably for the best because I don’t have time for tinkering or system maintenance, and that’s what makes the immutable distros shine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Same here, since I tried ublue, I can't go back, it just works without a headache. I even made, very easily because of their great tools, my own personal ublue based "distro" which has all I need out of the box. I really like the immutable/flatpak concept and the ability to make your own version of it easily.

[–] ikidd 1 points 2 days ago

I had issues with Boxbuddy on Aurora, couldn't get it to clone containers. Pinged the BB author, he said it was distro related and I'd agree since the same version worked on regular Fedora. Then I started having other issues with it just pausing doing standard things like opening files, sometimes for like 15 seconds. Generally it was slow as hell and I blew it out and went back to Fedora. This was maybe a couple weeks ago.

I'm not really holding it against Aurora, but sure didn't seem like it was ready to be used as a DD on that laptop yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My experience with it has been mostly positive, however the laptop I’m running it on is aging and now doesn’t have support for hardware accelerated video decoding for some of the newer codecs. Watching some streams and videos has been a painful experience. Not sure if there’s a way around that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

As you mentioned, this is a hardware thing and the hardware itself must support the codec. You can't make hardware support something it doesn't any more than you can download more ram

[–] node815 0 points 2 days ago

Hmmm...my system is a Dell Optiplex 990 SFF PC so about 14 years old and seems to run Youtube without issues or buffering. I have yet to see if any local media does the same. But I'm also running 16gb of RAM which is the system's max and it's pretty much not had any issues since giving it that much.