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!
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager
Direct pacman use is blocked. /usr/bin/pacman is a wrapper around pacman-real
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?
I was just finishing this quarter’s distro-hop frenzy, but seeing as you are apparently using Lemmy as your network platform as opposed to fucking discord or similar crap, I think I’ll give this a shot for sure. Thanks, we need more devs with this train of thought.
Yeah, Linux distros using something like Discord always seemed very odd to me. I mean okay, if you cater to gamers then I guess it makes sense, but you won’t catch me doing that. Lemmy is the only social media I have anymore, the rest is just braindead and bot-infested.
I finally finished reading the whole page at https://pu-239.org/
Pretty awesome. I wanted to do it earlier, but life happens. Now that the weekend is coming up, I want to give it a shot.
After reading the page, I could not find any mention of the home directory.
Since I do distro-hop quite a bit, I have a disk just for my home partition that I (almost) never format so that I can keep my files there and move around distros without a worry.
How would you suggest I partition the root/boot/EFI disk for installing your distro? I usually keep a 1GB ext4 boot partition, a 2GB EFI partition and then the rest is a BTRFS partition for root (the disk for home is a single BTRFS partition). I know it sounds like overkill, but that disk is 1TB so I’m not worried about that and like to leave room for any potential storage weirdness.
Would you make any changes to that logic if you were in my shoes?
I was just about to go to bed so apologies for the short answer, I can elaborate tomorrow if you wish. The home folder, including your settings/configs will survive, there’s no difference in the way you organize files to a regular Arch install. The partitioning is preset and non-customizable (for now at least). So no need to worry, you simply install it with the hardcoded presets and use it like you would use your current install! I will likely set up a kind of wiki page to make this more sorted and readable than the current bloated drop-down menu so I can cover this in more detail in the future.
Edit: aah, I overread the first time that you have a home folder that you keep. In your case I would back it up on another drive/cloud first and then try one of the installer options that fit you the most. I should get the option for manual partitioning up and running, but if you don’t do it it exactly like the installer expects, it will fail, which is why I only defined three pre-set options.
Oh, cool. Thanks for replying. I did install it in a VM for now. Now that I know what my options are, I can take it from there.
I won’t be able to back up all my data from home in a way that males sense right now outside of my laptop, so Barr metal won’t be happening until next weekend.
It feels pretty solid right now. I’m going to replicate my KDE configuration from the laptop onto the P-239 VM see how it behaves.
That’s nice to hear! My personal feedback and the feedback from people that have tried it so far seems way better than I anticipated, noone seems to have any big issues. A little more choice during the install, a little less weird messages during updates (nothing critical, just looks odd) and some AUR packages that don’t install in a way that conform to the Arch guidelines (which is more on them than on the OS) and that’s about all the negatives.
I’ll be on vacation for a week and only take my underpowered Thinkpad with me so I’ll be working on some little qol changes here and there to bring a more polished version in a few short weeks. If noone finds anything big that needs fixing I might even be able to justify bumping the version number of the next release to 0.1.0 instead of 0.0.2 since it’s way more stable than I dared to expect.
I like what I’m seeing here, since you are actually covering a niche that nobody else seems to be covering (maybe they are and I just haven’t seen it).
I find value in all this. I am certainly no Dev, but have enough experience with many different Linux distros to at least serve as a guinea-pig for good projects. Enjoy your vacation, I’ll be trying to break your distro while you’re away.
One thing I believe this could benefit from, if possible, is a way to discuss the project in real time, Matrix, IRC, anything really. Just a thought.
I appreciate it! I’d be especially interested in knowing if there are any locations/directories that the user expects to be carried through deployments or to be writeable that get deleted/overwritten during updates or are read-only in the first place. Finding that would perhaps also fix the issues with some AUR packages not wanting to install. Ideally you can e-mail me your findings to the address on my Codeberg profile and I could write on the code during the vacation and actually test in a VM on my main PC once I get back.
Regarding the platform to discuss on, someone else asked a similar thing today so I’m just pasting my reply here “Hmm, I’m undecided. Me personally, I couldn’t handle running a forum due to my autism, that would burn me out instantly. Having one entirely community run with me occasionally lurking in like I do here would probably be the only realistic option.”
I will try this on my Thinkpad this weekend. Thank you for making it. Is there any way in contributing to it?
Lots of people with Thinkpads, I respect it haha. Yes, code can be contributed via Codeberg, donations via Liberapay, both are greatly apprechiated! Both links are on the website, but I’ll put them here for your convenience: https://codeberg.org/cantosun/pu-239 https://liberapay.com/Pu-239/donate
They are workhorses under Linux :D Thank you for the links, i will take a look and will figure some way out.
I have a shitty X13 Gen 1 myself, which was the first machine (well apart from the probably 50 VMs I spun up during testing) to run this distro! I think the first 5 PCs (that I know of) were Thinkpads, I love it.
i tried it today on my T480 :) Installation was easy but then I got looking for the declerative file to edit my installation. Do you consider creating a forum for discussions and stuff for cooperation?
Either pu-239-update for the gui or /var/lib/pu-239/packages.list manual!
Hmm, I’m undecided. Me personally, I couldn’t handle running a forum due to my autism, that would burn me out instantly. Having one entirely community run with me occasionally lurking in like I do here would probably be the only realistic option.
Ayy, cachyos kernel with ostree atomic model, and minimal LLM involvement? Sounds like the next distro I will try :D Thanks for the works!
Thank you! I was wondering why noone has tried that yet and now I know why, but hey, it works now. I hope you will have fun with it!
A distro in just 300 hours? is it artisan coded or sloppadoppadoo?
Well, it were four 80 hour weeks and I “only” reverse-engineered the way Fedora makes their distro atomic with ostree but adapted to Arch. I did try to stay true to the Arch philosophy of keeping it minimal otherwise so it wasn’t that big of a project!
Edit: Sometimes I had to spin up Qwen 3.8 27B because the error codes the installer threw out were literally humanly unreadable so I had no clue what even went wrong but other than that it was by hand lmao
not that anything stands a chance anymore but lol, another project that doesn’t care about ever being found by search engine. right up there with “matrix” and “riot”
You are right, I thought about that too late, but if you search it together with “linux” it already shows up!
“peee-ewwww”.
why is it that open source folks have such a difficult time naming things?
I really like the idea behind this project, I don’t usually try random distros but this caught my eye, I might put it on my laptop.
Also good job not supporting big tech AI and vibe-coding :)
Haha, I feel honored to hear that! It’s still rough around the edges, so only use it if this isn’t your only PC. That said, I already use it on my Thinkpad and the only issue I myself encountered so far is that I had to use vscodium-electron-bin instead of vscodium-bin since it wanted to make a systemlink that caused the install to interrupt, otherwise it’s been smooth sailing so far.
If you can provide one without any DE that would be nice
That’s planned! Initially I actually planned to have a desktop selection in Calamares with KDE Plasma, GNOME and no DE, but while I was drafting the package lists for that I decided to push that back for a later release. This first one is more or less supposed to be a proof of concept so features like that are definitely in the works, but deemed overkill for the first version.
Finally! I know what I’ll try over the weekend after I made backups 😇
Hell yeah, let me know how it goes!
Looks cool! Why was it called plutonium?
Thank you! In a perfect world I would have loved to name it “Arch Atomic”, but I’m not affiliated with them so I went for a wordplay on atomic with my favorite isotope!
Looks cool, I’ll drop this on my Thinkpad tonight when I get home from work.
I’m excited to hear your feedback! Keep in mind, some things might be buggy, but please notify me and they will be taken care of.
Will do!
How similar is this to CachyOS? Can the experience essentially be like CachyOS but atomic?
My plan is to have it on par, if not better than them. Currently I “only” (this is the biggest factor by far) provide the CachyOS kernel compiled by myself but I already differenciate myself by also compiling it for -v2 CPUs. All five microarchitectures have their dedicated repos up and working and I plan to ship all the packages that will boost speed by being compiled microarchitecture-specific.
I’m already building the server needed for that so compiling them automatically will be possible even while I’m on vacation next week.
Does it come with KDE preinstalled or is that just for the screenshot?
I’d love to give it a try on my secondary laptop as it sounds just great, but I really can’t stand KDE.
Edit: KDE is the only desktop available, but if I understand that correctly alternatives are on the roadmap?
