Hey there!
I was a Linux distrohopper for a long time. The Debians and Ubuntus didnt work out so I switched to Fedora.
That was also veeery breakey so after 2 weeks or so I switched to Fedora Kinoite (OSTree atomic desktop).
I am on that now for multiple years, and the main bottleneck simply is easy RPM development, to add whatever you want to the image. Or custom image creation.
And the other issue is constant reboots and frequent updates. While the technology is great for like school Laptops etc, the constant changes make it a bad choice.
So I am happy that I found HeliumOS!
I installed it on my Corebooted Chromebook, got --user flatpaks working (not the system ones) and a distrobox installed.
Now I want to get more into this
- Do a CentOS Stream 10 version
- Reduce the base image size as much as possible
- Make a KDE Plasma 6 variant
- Make a server variant
Anyone else thinking about the same?
Cheers!
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Not much activity here, but I do like the sound of this. Very stable OS to begin with, and then RO filesystem.
When you say you want to create KDE and Server variants, do you have a script to customize the set of packages? I know the RO OpenSUSE and Fedora variants (MicroOS/Aeon and IoT/Silverblue) get kinda sketchy when you start deviating from the original package list, especially rpm-ostree, which starts taking exponentially longer to update the more non-original .rpms are layered onto the fs.
Aeon not as bad, the RO btrfs filesystem seems a lot more forgiving to customization, but I still think rpms aren’t really supported (or at least not suggested)
I ditzed around with distrobox long enough to feel like some serious infrastructure could go inside containers, which would let me leave the original filesystem completely alone. I was running MicroOS and ran both Arch and Fedora containers and spun up things like Virt-Manager and paru/pkgbuild and it surprisingly didn’t seem nearly as buggy as I’d expect. Distrobox has come a really long way.
Hey, I know this board and thread are pretty dead, but I don’t see anywhere to discuss HeliumOS besides Github or Codeberg issues, and this isn’t a bug report
Wanted to let our OP and others know the HeliumOS early Jan 2025 Alpha-beta-gamma scary-unstable looking version was actually really great. There’s hiccups in the UI for adding files with the KDE settings manager when the RO FS can’t permit, which is to be expected without disabling a fairly massive amount of upstream features, so that didn’t bother me, and was to be expected.
I love the bootc management of updating the entire image at once, instead of using rpm-ostree (do I have that right? Is that how I’m supposed to do that?) I’ve only ever tried MicroOS and Silverblue, and while I thought they were nice in their own ways, I didn’t appreciate how hard it was to add niche terminal software I want that requires root permissions, programs for virtualization and containers, and software defined networking, so I gave it up until today.
I have to say, the bootc paradigm is so stringent, I thought it would put me off, but the fact that the filesystem (except $HOME) seems so locked down kinda makes me finally want to give up and only use software that’s available (maintaining a small $HOME/bin of binaries compiled from source, naturally) and whatever I can get to work using distrobox (which is getting absolutely amazing).
BTW it looked like the ublue rofs enthusiasts on Github, who apparently put together bootc (if I have that correct) were talking about adopting HeliumOS as one of the ublue line, either replacing Aurora LTS or as another Ublue offering, so two good things: 1) even if HeliumOS totally tanks in its current form, there’s been enough interest to already create similar alternatives, and 2) if Ublue gets ahold of the release cadence, I am guessing it’ll be more vigorously maintained (pure conjecture on my part)
best
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