Read a distrowatch review that dropped earlier today discussing the two of them and kind of tears them apart: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250714. I used both a year or so ago and Aeon seemed to perform well enough, but I was pretty disappointed with Kalpa. What are folks experiences with them and how do they compare with something like Fedora Atomic Desktops if you have experience with both?
I’ve been using Aeon since March or so this year, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I don’t know if it’s my old hardware (AMD 3500U from ~2017), or if it’s a more common experience, but I’ve had to mess with the recovery key about 5 times (which is a super long, random key that i have to type from a picture), which is ridiculous IMO. Some updates trigger an SELinux check, which locks up boot for something like 10 minutes when it triggers, and given my use of my machine, I have to sit through it. That sucks.
I’m still using it on my laptop, but I’m not going to switch my Tumbleweed desktop to it because there has been just enough friction to bother me and I’d end up breaking the whole point of the system to fix it (e.g. I dislike bash as the default shell, distro-enter doesn’t do some important things, etc).
If the encryption key thing is just my hardware, I think it’s fine for most people. But if it’s as common as it was for me, I can only recommend it to power users, and those would be better off with Tumbleweed anyway.
So yeah, I think it’s a cool idea, but it needs something to help ease the friction of working with it.
Not shocked at the issues. The review I mention at the top of the post has some similar lockups upon boot. I am a TW desktop user as well and am planning on keeping it that way, but I’ll definitely give Aeon a go on a laptop and see if it has the same issues you mentioned or whether it’s a more a hardware issue. Thanks for sharing your experiences!
Yeah, no worries! I like the idea of Aeon, I just had some trouble with it. I’ll see how the next few months go.