Aeon Desktop

Reader supplied reviews for Aeon Desktop Average rating 9.0 from 4 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: -- 2026050420251231 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: 20260202 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-02-16 Country: Costa Rica Votes: 4 Removing 1 point because the installation process hangs on my system and I find that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. But when it succeeds... it's pretty much everything I want from a distro at this point: Gnome with minimal applications out of the box. The distribution isn't making choices for you, it's minimal and I love that. With other distros, a few minutes are spent removing unwanted apps and packages. Not the case here, the minutes are spent choosing and adding which is way more fun. Seamless updates - they just happen, every once in a while. You get a notification stating that if you restart you'll be on the latest image. Sweet. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20260202 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-02-14 Country: Croatia Votes: 0 I've been using Linux since 1994. when a neighbour of mine offered me some Slackware floppy disks and cursed me to hook up on this operating system. However, the relationship with Linux has not been without its ups and downs, especially since I found most of the distributions lacking something different, and none offering (almost) everything I expected. That is, until I installed Aeon recently. So far, this looks like the best distribution I tried. Apart from immutability and minimalism, the distro comes with great sane defaults, up to the configuration of mount options suitable for slow hard disks, and correct configuration for using zram swap as well as hibernation (the distro automatically set the priorities for zram as well as for physical drive partition for hibernation). Also, the distro seems to support binaries compiled for newer CPU instructions ("v3") out of the box. I also hold Fedora-based immutable distros, as well as Cachy OS (a rolling one) in high regard, but I am not sure if Fedora Silverblue - based distros support "v3" binaries, and, although they are almost perfect and even seemingly more polished on the surface, not all of them support my language and locale that well as Aeon (e.g. I can choose the keyboard in Bazzite, but if I choose to change the locale in Gnome, there's a bunch of locale-related errors in console). Cachy OS, another excellent (although rolling) distribution, almost made my motherboard unusable after enabling secure boot, due to the fact that the GPU drivers were unsigned. Also, I had some problems after configuring zram, since I also had a physical swap, so hibernation was in collision with that until I figured out the need for priorities in configuration. So, in search of a perfect distro, I guess Aeon ticked all the required marks: immutability coupled with freshness of the rpms coming from Tumbleweed, proper Secure Boot support out of the box (seemingly so far), sane defaults, good mount options in /etc/fstab, optimized system and so on... However, the setup using raw.xz format and tik is unstable on my machine, both in KVM/QEMU (also convoluted, requiring importing the raw image and setting up another drive, defining UEFI in virt-manager etc...) as well as on bare metal (seemingly a different problem, but basically the installation stalls while deploying the os image to the hard drive). Also, distrobox has problems installing boxes when running in KVM , even with the drive set to disable Cow and a raw image (I guess there is some problem with virtio and concurrent HDD activity). However, I managed to first install OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a HDD and then convert it to Aeon by installing "Aeon*.rpm" packages available through zypper GUI. So, I am not quite sure which of the sane defaults belong to Tumbleweed and which to Aeon, but I am very satisfied anyway. Finally, after using Aeon, though for a limited time, and with all the basic setup and autoconfiguration capabilities, I can understand the rationale for deprecation of Yast in Leap, although at first, I thought it was a shot in Suse's own foot, because it really defined the distribution. I am a bit worried of the distribution's future, since it seems it is not an official immutable desktop distribution (Kalpa is), and the documentation is sparse. But, apart from installation difficulties and uncertainty regarding the distro's future and the company's roadmap policies which made me gave it a 9/10, I can only praise the ingenuity of the distro and its creator(s). I am considering putting it on a faster drive and using it as a daily driver, instead of another, also immutable distro, which I was very satisfied with until I tried Aeon. Enough said. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 20251109 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-11-12 Votes: 4 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 See all 4 reader reviews of Aeon Desktop...