Aeon: openSUSE for lazy developers
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The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for "lazy developers" who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration. System-tinkerers need not apply.
The idea behind Aeon, as with other immutable (or image-based) Linux distributions, is to provide the core of the distribution as a read-only image or filesystem that is updated atomically and can be rolled back if needed. Google's ChromeOS was the first popular Linux-based desktop operating system to follow this model. Since the release of ChromeOS a number of interesting immutable implementations have cropped up, such as Fedora Silverblue, Project Bluefin (covered here in December 2023), openSUSE's MicroOS (covered here in March 2023), and Ubuntu Core.
What makes up the core software and how the immutable bits are composed, deployed, and managed varies quite a bit between distributions. Aeon uses a utility called transactional-update (with openSUSE's Zypper package manager under the hood) and Btrfs subvolumes to create and update system snapshots. Basically, instead of installing and updating a system with individual packages while it is running, the updates are applied in the background to a separate Btrfs snapshot and then the system is rebooted into that snapshot. The /home and /var directories are, of course, writable Btrfs volumes; /etc uses overlayfs to apply local changes on top of the default configuration files.
