openSUSE {Aeon,Kalpa,MicroOS}?

So I was made aware of a thread on reddit where it’s brought up that folks don’t understand the relationship between openSUSE MicroOS, openSUSE Aeon, and openSUSE Kalpa.

This blog post will attempt to clear up some misunderstandings and misconceptions about the relationship between the three “Distributions”.

Timeline

MicroOS

In 2019, openSUSE released MicroOS to the community, which is a minimalist, “immutable” linux distribution, that is intended to do “one job”, deploying containers, or other workloads, while staying out of your way.

Based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, MicroOS is meant to require minimal maintenance, updating itself automatically, and atomically, with a read-only base system. In many ways, it’s an “Install the system, and then forget it exists” and do all of your messy work that breaks things in containers.

Being based on Tumbleweed, MicroOS is continuously rolling, assuring that you get the latest software updates and security improvements in your base system, if something goes wrong in the update, it’s discarded, and your running system remains untouched, and continues to work just as you expect.

It’s pretty nice.

Aeon

In 2020, Richard Brown announced and released to the community the “MicroOS Desktop” which provided a GNOME desktop on top of MicroOS. I won’t go into all the reasons Richard wanted this, he can speak for himself, and has written a few things about it in various places already, in addition to presentations you can find on youtube.

tldr; You get all of the benefits of the immutable and atomic nature of MicroOS, for your desktop machine.

In 2023, the decision was made to “Rebrand” the MicroOS Desktop to clear up any confusion with the MicroOS server distribution, and focus more on the desktop. This is when “openSUSE MicroOS Desktop GNOME” became “openSUSE Aeon” and began to diverge from MicroOS.

Aeon is currently in an RC2 release state, and is in the process of migrating from the YaST based installer that MicroOS uses, to a new installer called Tik, amongst many other changes and improvements, that make more sense for a desktop focused distribution.

Kalpa

Sometime after Richard released/announced the MicroOS Desktop he was developing, some folks thought to themselves “Hey, that’s pretty nifty! We should offer a KDE Plasma version of that!” and later in 2020, they did exactly that. and the “openSUSE MicroOS Desktop Plasma” became a thing. (I apologize for not giving credit to those folks, as I wasn’t involved at the time, and don’t actually know who did it.)

To be clear, this wasn’t a version of the project that Richard was interested in, as he doesn’t use Plasma, and he had his hands quite full with with his own efforts on the GNOME desktop. And openSUSE is a project where people work on what they’re interested in.

In July of 2022, Richard announced that the Plasma version of the MicroOS Desktop was being dropped, due to lack of maintainers, and maintenance, and the project was in very rough shape.

This is where your humble (not so humble? your call) author comes into the picture, and decided to put in the work to keep the Plasma version of the MicroOS Desktop alive. With some help from the existing MicroOS Desktop GNOME developers, the MicroOS Desktop Plasma was brought back to a state of being installable, and basically reliable for folks to use, in an ALPHA release state.

In the same announcement in 2023, it was announced that the “openSUSE MicroOS Desktop Plasma” would be renamed to “openSUSE Kalpa”

And that brings us to:

Where are we today?

openSUSE Kalpa remains in somewhat of the same state as it was at the point of the 2023 rebranding announcement. For various reasons, Kalpa has yet to attract a group of developers to help push it along, and get it out of the ALPHA release state that it currently exists in. It’s perfectly usable as it sits, as there are plenty of folks out there using it. It still is installed via the MicroOS installation ISO with the YaST based installer, and lacks many of the newer features that openSUSE Aeon has developed in the roughly 12 months since the rebranding announcement.

Why is openSUSE Kalpa lagging behind?

Firstly, it needs to be made very clear, that Aeon and Kalpa are not the same project. Kalpa exists as a downstream project of Aeon, at present. None of the work done by the Aeon developers is automatically being pushed into Kalpa. Aeon does what Aeon does, and what makes sense for their vision, and what works with the GNOME stack. And Kalpa is developed from that, adopting the things that Aeon does that makes sense, and developing on our own, the things that we need to. The Aeon developers don’t develop with Kalpa in mind, nor should they. Yes, much of what Aeon does can basically be pulled into Kalpa verbatim, but not everything is that way.

Secondly, Aeon has attracted a dedicated group of developers and maintainers, that are pushing it forward, which allows them to move much faster than Kalpa does. Kalpa is still mostly a single-developer project, and that single developer has more than one responsibility out there. So things move along much more slowly.

So what does this mean for openSUSE Kalpa?

There is every intention for Kalpa to move to the tik installer, that Aeon is moving forward with. Non-public test images of Kalpa installed via Tik currently exist, there’s just some bugaboos that need to be ironed out, before being tossed out to the community for testing and tweaking.

Kalpa will likely be adopting whatever storage encryption scheme Aeon settles on, rather than rolling our own, and leveraging as much of the “below the desktop” enhancements as we can, rather than reinventing the wheel.

But it is more involved than just going through Aeon’s patterns and build documents, and doing a global s/GNOME/Plasma/g because GNOME and Plasma do things differently in many places, and not everything that makes sense for a GNOME environment make sense for a Plasma one. Different Desktops, different toolkits, different display manager, and we face the design principle issue.

What design principle issue? For good, or for ill, GNOME is very very opinionated about how their desktop is intended to be used, and the folks that use the GNOME desktop largely understand that, there are just less moving parts there for Aeon to worry itself about, when it comes to the desktop, because for many things, there is “one true way” for GNOME, when it comes to packaging and configuration.

Over here in Kalpa, with the Plasma desktop, that’s not the case. And many long time Plasma users are very used to being able to tweak, and change, and twist to their personal preference, practically every aspect of their desktop environment. Which is almost antithetical to Aeon’s design goals, to be something you just install, and use, and the Desktop stays out of your way.

This does create a more involved development process, and creates a potentially more challenging support environment for Kalpa, which also slows things down a bit, and maintaining the “anything goes” historical nature of the Plasma Desktop isn’t actually one of our design goals. A big part of the development is in sorting out sensible defaults, so that Kalpa can offer the same sort of out of the box, just install it and go, that Aeon can.

Is this a fools errand? Possibly, but Tumbleweed always exists for those folks that want the ability to tweak every last aspect of their environment.

Where can I learn more, or try to get involved?

If you are interested in openSUSE Kalpa, want to know what’s going on with it, have questions, or even wish to know where you can contribute, Please see:

Please, don’t bother the Aeon developers for updates on what is going on with Kalpa. They do a lot of work, that we’re very appreciative of, and would like to continue having a good relationship with them, and badgering them over a project that they’re not responsible for doesn’t help.