"Aurora is a paradigm shift for Linux." "Dream about the stars" "Launch a space rocket" - everything about this, down to the choice of the crudely drawn desktop wallpaper, suggests to me that this was done by very young people. If a few kids want to make themselves a "distro" like this, go for it, just don't advertise it as anything more than a simple pet project, let alone a "paradigm shift".
Besides that, IIRC this is based on Fedora, so it stands on the shoulders of over two decades of work on Fedora.
Surely I'd use Fedora Silverblue if I wanted an immutable Fedora.
So much better approach is to get most of what you prefer by picking right distro. On the other hand ublue makes it very upproachable to make such distros (even yourself). Thats why there are so many of them.
I looked at their website and found no DISA STIG documents. I wonder what jurisdiction they’re planning on launching space rockets from?
I wonder if the unspoken “paradigm” shift is the distribution was vibe coded.
There’s a lot of contradictions on the landing page that would easily be explained by either kids writing it, or someone vibecoding the site.
Such as their claim that updates are a “single iso”, and also their claim about a single App Store, and they then go on to discuss flatpak and homebrew package management.
Or their claim to have redesigned the desktop from the ground up, while boasting they run KDE/Plasma.
And there’s also the claims that it brings something totally new while then going on to describe core Linux features.
Also the scripts running “non intrusively” yet that’s just what you’d expect any seasoned admin to do. This isn’t a headline feature unless you’re new to the game.
Good luck to the guys. I hope they enjoy the exercise. But this is definitely a hobby project cosplaying as a serious distro
> Aurora is nothing more than a collection of bash scripts, containerfiles and custom programs stitched together.
That sentence appearing on the same page as "rock-solid" is not very convincing either and does not instil confidence.
2) Including homebrew in a Linux distro is a criminal offense normally punished by public flogging.
Homebrew is great and we will be using it a lot more in the future.
I know there were attempts for this before but they were just banking on the fact that the average dev env is an absurd collection of hacked together tools that is both fragile and nigh impossible to set up for new devs. Now they have a financial angle as well /s
Then, you don't need any other device, hence "ultimate".
Convergence, Samsung Dex, lots have tried but nothing mature yet. Well, Dex is mature but closed-source and Samsung-dependent. On the linux no-android smartphone side of things, hardware is too low-cost and the phone aspects of linux too brittle.
Aurora is just a new distro...
If we allow ourselves to dream it's not impossible we'll be able to run Windows games on Android in some future :)
While this is the direction many are going for particular use-cases (IoT in particular), I am very much conflicted.
Yes, inconsistent updates between components have caused a couple of nights of fixing my RPM or DEB based systems in my 27 years of using Linux on desktop (but mostly when I mixed sources of packages).
But at the same time, the modern systems thinking is to decouple things to be able to update and upgrade independently. Think distributed systems like web applications. This needs a change in developing components, but once internalized, both improves and speeds up the delivery.
So with traditional Linux distributions already being a mix (small packaged upgrades, but released as a collection - a "release" or "version" of a distribution), this decidedly moves in the other direction.
How does a security fix get quickly applied here? Can one do kernel livepatching? How do you quickly update a component depended on by everything else?
Exactly this. I think I have spent something like 2 hours fixing such issues in the last 15 years.
I don't get it when people say "at least with X I don't need to reformat and reinstall my whole system every year", or "it keeps breaking". I have used Debian, Arch, Alpine and Gentoo, and I really just don't have problems? Lucky me, I guess.
You might find some extensive answers to your questions in the bootc documentation which is the container runtime running at the core of Aurora and other Universal Blue distributions, like the increasingly popular distribution Bazzite for Linux based gaming.
But honestly, since Emacs is so core to my personal workflow, I think that it's fine to use a system extension for it. Alternatively it could be layered on, which would also of course work. After that, interacting with the containers is of course just using TRAMP to "connect" to them, and that of course works just fine.
[0]: <https://github.com/fedora-sysexts/fedora> & <https://fedora-sysexts.github.io/fedora/>
It could be very effective for bringing in those who are not particularly computer literate under the claimed guarantee that a random update is unlikely to break the machine. But you would also need significant financial backing and marketing with strong brand recognition to inspire that kind of confidence.
Fun fact, a bit over a decade ago we were probably the first one ever to publish a distribution to rely on btrfs snapshots per default with the Jolla phone. Sadly that did bite us due to reliability of btrfs at the time, and later phones switched to ext4, but with a stable filesystem it's a nice mechanism for handling updates and factory reset.
As others have mentioned, would love a more thorough overview and/or a "who is this for".