Read a distrowatch review that dropped earlier today discussing the two of them and kind of tears them apart: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250714. I used both a year or so ago and Aeon seemed to perform well enough, but I was pretty disappointed with Kalpa. What are folks experiences with them and how do they compare with something like Fedora Atomic Desktops if you have experience with both?
Thanks for the detailed response! I’ll definitely need to take a look at fedoras atomic distros myself. Seems like they are well put together. Just to clarify though what do you mean by configuration drift?
A system that has updated from say Ubuntu 16.04 to 24.04 is different from a system that fresh installed Ubuntu 24.04.
The upgrade process is imperfect. It may keep older software around, old configuration files. Users may also make small tweaks and forget about them.
I remember like a year ago OpenSUSE Tumbleweed broke for users who had old installs. They were using the old networking stack, the upgrade system never migrated them to the newer networking stack. And since OpenSUSE’s test suite was only made up of new installs, the issue wasn’t caught until after it was released.
Fedora Atomic tries to solve this issue. When you update, the entire root filesystem is effectively replaced (the immutable parts anyway). Though it tries not to touch manual changes you make in places like /etc. It does something called a 3 way merge to preserve your changes and does keep better track of them than traditional distros.
Ah that makes sense. Kind of surprised Aeon / Kalpa don’t have a similar feature but it does seem like the fedora atomic distros have had a little more time to cook in comparison to openSUSEs attempts. It would be nice to see something like this implemented at some point, but I am sure the current maintainers already have a lot on their plate. Thank you for breaking it down for me!