I (mostly) agree. I believe that bootc might have played a role in EU_OS’ decision to pick Fedora over openSUSE. Back then, it wasn’t possible to use it outside of Fedora’s ecosystem. But Bootcrew has since released bootc images for other distros; including openSUSE. So hopefully they will reconsider it.
Great answer. Thank you!
I hope openSUSE will eventually get around and enjoy some much deserved momentum. I feel it isn’t quite reaching its full potential as a project, because it (somehow) fails to attract a bigger audience. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely doing well and it holds its own admirably. But, (going off of ProtonDB’s data) where Fedora (together with its derivatives) managed to effectively increase its market share by at least 400%, openSUSE[1] -despite Tumbleweed making more sense for gaming- was only able to keep what it had…
It’s the green colored bar found right under Manjaro ↩︎
If I may, would you seriously consider switching to openSUSE Slowroll if Manjaro’s situation doesn’t improve? Or, are there reasons beyond its beta status that hold you back?
My apologies for inserting this “akshually ☝️”, but I’m almost 100% sure that the distro that just didn’t make the cut -the one represented in green, right under Manjaro- is openSUSE. It’s possible to deduce this from an earlier report of Boiling Steam and its respective graph.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t ever recall seeing Slackware in any of these.
FWIW, similarly, we can deduce the grey one right below openSUSE to be Gentoo from this report and its respective graph. And, finally, the blue one below Gentoo to be Garuda from the respective graph of this report.
The last distro I was able to identify is Solus. Unfortunately, it’s only relevant in the very beginning. It used to be the best performing grey one. See this report and its respective graph.
Asahi Linux is basically top notch engineering for free. Unless it gets (really) big, I don’t see any reason for Apple to even consider putting it down.
I could see it becoming the future. But only under a couple of scenarios.
Scenario A: It becomes (strictly) better and/or easier than the alternative. Kinda like how systemd effectively replaced SysVinit within a couple of years, simply because it was a more sane alternative. But this is reliant on the read-only aspect being put in place without affecting existing workflows on traditional distros. So, as Fedora Atomic is the atomic distro I’m most familiar with, I’ll provide explicit examples from it:
dnf should (somehow) continue to function. It could even be an alias (or something) that invokes something else entirely. I don’t even think most users will care for what exactly happens in the background, as long as the functional expectation is being met.Scenario B: It’s enforced on us by (some of) our Linux overlords and/or expected by (parts of) the Desktop Linux stack. Kinda like how the GNOME desktop environment currently has dependencies that are systemd-components. Thus, requiring some hacking to make it work in its absence. Currently, I can only see some RHEL(-adjacent) projects committing to this.
But I think both of the above scenarios are at least 5 years away. While atomic/immutable distros enjoy a healthy (perhaps even generous) amount of development, AFAIK none of them are actually 100% feature-complete[1] compared to their traditional counterparts. So, fixing (most of) the remaining edge cases to make migration possible for every enthusiast that even considers switching, should probably be their priority.
To be clear, it’s probably at like 95% or so. ↩︎
From their wiki:
The em dashes definitely gives me LLM-vibes. Regardless, it mostly comes over as Void Linux with KDE Plasma and some onboarding. And I suppose they have their own repository. Furthermore, I think it’s a very new distro as their Github activities only go two months back.
To OP: Why would you use this over (some) other Void derivatives? Secondly, as you state
Why even bother with any of these to begin with?