Aeon Desktop

Reader supplied reviews for Aeon Desktop Average rating 9.0 from 2 review(s) What are your thoughts on Aeon Desktop? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 20251109 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 20251109 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-11-12 Votes: 1 Aeon is a an OpenSUSE spin-off. It is a so-called immutable distribution. It is minimalistic and very lean. It is fully encrypted by default. It is rolling-release. It auto-updates itself. It is mostly unbreakable due to btrfs-snapshots. It is really fast. Aeon gives you a modern GNU/Linux distribution with the latest Linux kernel, SystemD, Wayland, and the Gnome desktop environment. You install software flatpaks from the Software store with a single mouseclick. You don't have to know what any of this means, it just works. Aeon does not play well with multi-boot, it expects to own the full harddrive. It does not give you direct access to the underpinnings of the system. Workloads requiring lower-level access (you've got rw-access to Aeon's /etc however) must be run in sandboxed container environments via Distrobox or Flatpak. Both integrate seamlessly into Aeon. If you want a hassle-free and reliable system, Aeon is the future. If you like to fuzz and tinker around, stay away. The only drawbacks are that Aeon requires modern hardware with a TPM and is not suited for older machines. Also, if Aeon breaks and can't recover on its own, it can be much harder to fix it because you first have to get to a so-called transactional shell that allows you to work on the nuts and bolts. This is convoluted by design. However, I've been running Aeon since RC2, maybe 2 years ago, and I had exactly two issues. Both could be fixed by following instructions from the developers who are very active on the distribution's Reddit channel (thank god no Discord!) Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20251021 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-10-31 Votes: 20 I've been using Aeon Desktop on my HP Pavilion Aero laptop for close to a year. It is an immutable, rolling-release distribution with a small footprint: the base OS basically consists of the Linux kernel, Systemd, Wayland, GNOME desktop, and not much else. It is technically possible to install additional software in the base OS, but this is not recommended unless absolutely necessary (like hardware drivers). Installation of Aeon Desktop is simple and doesn't offer many options. Notably, the installer doesn't support dual-boot. Aeon comes with a "stock" GNOME desktop, where nothing is customized except the wallpaper and accent color. The default selection of apps is delightfully minimal, but can be extended from a slightly larger list during installation. Almost all apps are flatpaks, including the default web browser (Firefox), so they can be installed or removed later in GNOME Software. By the way, GNOME Software is really fast on Aeon, probably because it's configured to only install flatpaks (from Flathub) and firmware updates. For non-flatpak applications and command-line tools, Aeon recommends to use Distrobox. Distrobox is a tool to create Linux containers for any distribution you like, and is very easy to use. By default, Aeon creates a preconfigured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed container when you first run "distrobox enter". I installed the packages I need in the container with zypper, and setup the terminal to enter this distrobox by default. Some applications are not available on Flathub or in a Distrobox. For example, I do a lot of software development on this laptop, mainly using IntelliJ IDEA, and even though IDEA can be installed from Flathub, it's hindered a lot by the sandbox. So I downloaded the application directly from JetBrains' website, put it somewhere in my home directory, and created a shortcut that executes it from my default Distrobox container. This works flawlessly. The same can be done with apps distributed as an AppImage. There's one area where Aeon disappoints, and that is the fragility of the full-disk encryption. Initially it works well enough, but sometimes, in my case after a firmware update, the system suddenly refuses to boot until I enter a *very long* passphrase and then do a "TPM re-enrollment", as described in the Aeon documentation under "Advanced encryption". This is disappointing for a distribution that claims to "just work". Speaking of "just works", my favorite Aeon feature is how it automatically maintains itself in the background. There's a daily systemd service that downloads the latest system updates and installs them into a new btrfs filesystem snapshot. The running system is not changed, until the next restart boots into the new snapshot. Besides the base OS, Aeon also automatically upgrades packages in all Distrobox containers, and GNOME Software auto-updates all installed flatpak apps and runtimes. It's hard to overstate how nice this is. Aeon offers the latest and greatest software versions, but at the same time, I never manually start updates, and I never have to sit around waiting for updates to install, except for firmware updates. I literally don't have to care about updates anymore, but still my laptop is always on the newest Linux and GNOME versions. Long story short, I really like Aeon. I love it's minimal selection of packages so I can install just the apps I need. I like the vanilla GNOME environment and appreciate that Aeon kept it that way. I quickly became used to working with Distrobox. I especially like the automatic maintenance of the system. Was this review helpful? Yes No