Micro OS, a short first impression
I just tried Micro OS as a desktop for ... i admit, not long, maybe an hour, because I just found it to be *unusable* as a desktop for anyone who does not know all the differences between a transactional OS and a traditional Linux OS. To be frank and outright: While I believe that there definitely is a place for such a thing as transactional OS updates and package installations, that place is not on a desktop. At least not unless the user is actually *told about it* at first login. I installed µOS as "Plasma Desktop" in a VM, and was greeted after login with a plain Plasma Desktop with almost no apps, and no YaST either. And after finding discover I found that every installation process after the first failed without telling me why. Yes, I know, transactional, yadda yaddda - but the user needs to KNOW that each install needs a REBOOT (hello, windows 98) to be able to install another application - and the easiest way to be sure that the user knows that is what? Guess? Yep, telling them. which µOS does not, as of 20220718. So - begone for now. I'll have another look in a while(or maybe use it for the kind of stuff where it makes sense, like kubernetes workers or something like that). If this comes across as a bit harsh: what can I say, that was a bit disappointing after 25 years of (almost) nothing but positive experiences with SuSE and later openSUSE products. Cheers MH
I feel like you went into this with somewhat the wrong expectations. The whole point of this exercise was to take a test drive with MicroOS, a fairly small and still developing project with a small user base and see which parts of it already work well and which don't, to have a starting point and learn some valuable lessons for ALP. And you just did that successfully. You took a test drive and pointed out that the on-boarding isn't very good for a new, uninformed user and that the UI for installing new things is confusing/misleading. That's basically exactly how this was supposed to go.
So comparing your test drive for a developing project with your decades long experience with the openSUSE world seems a bit odd. Makes it look like you were expecting this test phase to immediately convince you of the merits of this new approach, which honestly just seems a bit unfair.
On July 20, 2022 10:18:21 AM GMT+02:00, Mathias Homann
I just tried Micro OS as a desktop for ... i admit, not long, maybe an hour, because I just found it to be *unusable* as a desktop for anyone who does not know all the differences between a transactional OS and a traditional Linux OS.
To be frank and outright: While I believe that there definitely is a place for such a thing as transactional OS updates and package installations, that place is not on a desktop. At least not unless the user is actually *told about it* at first login.
I installed µOS as "Plasma Desktop" in a VM, and was greeted after login with a plain Plasma Desktop with almost no apps, and no YaST either. And after finding discover I found that every installation process after the first failed without telling me why.
Yes, I know, transactional, yadda yaddda - but the user needs to KNOW that each install needs a REBOOT (hello, windows 98) to be able to install another application - and the easiest way to be sure that the user knows that is what?
Guess?
Yep, telling them. which µOS does not, as of 20220718.
So - begone for now. I'll have another look in a while(or maybe use it for the kind of stuff where it makes sense, like kubernetes workers or something like that).
If this comes across as a bit harsh: what can I say, that was a bit disappointing after 25 years of (almost) nothing but positive experiences with SuSE and later openSUSE products.
Cheers MH
Am Mittwoch, 20. Juli 2022, 11:11:29 CEST schrieb Lil Frogg:
you were expecting this test phase to immediately convince you of the merits of this new approach
Actually, I got exactly what I wanted, which was to see whether a transactional µOS would be good for a desktop. - for preinstalled corporate-y setups where noone ever has the power to add software: it might work. - for "power users" that install and/or remove stuff all the time: nope. not gonna work that well. Just imagine trying to file a bugreport for a KDE app, where you have to install debugpackages for a good backtrace... That being said, for any kind of server that is set up to do exactly the same kind of workloads all the time until it gets decommissioned, or for any kind of virtualisation or container worker, a transactional OS is exactly the right thing. I just don't think a transactional µOS would sit too well with any kind of "desktop power user". Here's a thought: It would be dead useful to have some kind of "builder kit" a.k.a. diskimage-builder that could be used to create µOS-based customized images that already have everything that the specific use case needs, and then you'd just clonezilla the image onto the harddisk (or import as VM) - but manually installing stuff on a transactional µOS is just too painful. Cheers MH -- Mathias Homann Mathias.Homann@openSUSE.org Jabber (XMPP): lemmy@tuxonline.tech Matrix: @mathias:eregion.de IRC: [Lemmy] on freenode and ircnet (bouncer active) keybase: https://keybase.io/lemmy gpg key fingerprint: 8029 2240 F4DD 7776 E7D2 C042 6B8E 029E 13F2 C102
On Wed, 2022-07-20 at 23:48 +0200, Mathias Homann wrote:
- for preinstalled corporate-y setups where noone ever has the power to add software: it might work. - for "power users" that install and/or remove stuff all the time: nope. not gonna work that well.
Well, "not gonna work that well" is actually false. In fact, there are quite a few "power users that install and/or remove stuff all the time" using Silverblue and, yes, also MicroOS Desktop (although, definitely less! :-P). This is made possiblle by the combination of flatpak apps and of toolbox and distrobox. Then, sure, it's still possible that one does not like it... It's also a matter of taste, after all. But it does work quite well. :-) That said, I agree with Lil that the feedback you're providing is very useful. It tells us that we need to make really sure that users will know what to do and how to use an immutable OS (and put together a better default environment, which we knew already! :-P).
Just imagine trying to file a bugreport for a KDE app, where you have to install debugpackages for a good backtrace...
Yeah, well, no. In fact, most of the times, you'll be filing bug
reports to Flathub, for which you don't need to install any RPM (and
hence no reboot).
Thanks and Regards
--
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D
http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Virtualization Software Engineer
SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/
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Also MicroOS KDE is called alpha for a reason. It does not add flathub by default yet, and installing rpm's you can't do in discover. Please follow the guide [1] in the MicroOS portal for using KDE. It also explains how to install rpm's Please don't judge MicroOS on this experience if you haven't researched first how to use it. /Syds [1] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Installation:_KDE
Mathias Homann
Am Mittwoch, 20. Juli 2022, 11:11:29 CEST schrieb Lil Frogg:
you were expecting this test phase to immediately convince you of the merits of this new approach
Actually, I got exactly what I wanted, which was to see whether a transactional µOS would be good for a desktop.
- for preinstalled corporate-y setups where noone ever has the power to add software: it might work. - for "power users" that install and/or remove stuff all the time: nope. not gonna work that well.
Just imagine trying to file a bugreport for a KDE app, where you have to install debugpackages for a good backtrace...
That being said, for any kind of server that is set up to do exactly the same kind of workloads all the time until it gets decommissioned, or for any kind of virtualisation or container worker, a transactional OS is exactly the right thing. I just don't think a transactional µOS would sit too well with any kind of "desktop power user".
Here's a thought: It would be dead useful to have some kind of "builder kit" a.k.a. diskimage-builder that could be used to create µOS-based customized images that already have everything that the specific use case needs, and then you'd just clonezilla the image onto the harddisk (or import as VM) - but manually installing stuff on a transactional µOS is just too painful.
There is kiwi [1], it is currently being used on OBS to build the
MicroOS desktop images over at devel:microos:images. You could branch
that package into your home project, adjust it to your liking and use
that image instead of the official one.
Cheers,
Dan
Footnotes:
[1] https://osinside.github.io/kiwi/
--
Dan Čermák
On Wed, 2022-07-20 at 08:18 +0000, Mathias Homann wrote:
I installed µOS as "Plasma Desktop" in a VM, and was greeted after login with a plain Plasma Desktop with almost no apps, and no YaST either. And after finding discover I found that every installation process after the first failed without telling me why.
Yes, Discover is currently using PackageKit's DNF as a backend, for managing RPM. In my experience, this works fine most of the times, but it's indeed not reliable enough. That's why we're (at least on the GNOME flavor) moving away from it. Point is... RPMs shouldn't be installed. Neither with Discover, nor with transactional-update or pkcon... ;-P
Yes, I know, transactional, yadda yaddda - but the user needs to KNOW that each install needs a REBOOT (hello, windows 98) to be able to install another application - and the easiest way to be sure that the user knows that is what?
Apps should be installed as Flatpaks, as that does not require reboot. On GNOME (although we still have other issues related to software updates), GNOME Software is preconfigured for only showing Flaptpaks from flathub. On KDE, I think Discover can do that, but it's probably not enabled by default. It's doable pretty easily, with just a couple of clicks, and no need to go to the terminal, but you're right that one needs to know that he/she needs to do that. If you noticed, during the installation, GNOME was marked RC, while Plasma is still ALPHA. Well, things like these are exactly the reason why that is the case. As far as I know, at least these basic things (i.e., flathub enabled by default, a flatpak browser pre-installed, etc) are being sorted out for Plasma as well.
So - begone for now. I'll have another look in a while(or maybe use it for the kind of stuff where it makes sense, like kubernetes workers or something like that).
Nah, it makes quite a bit of sense as a Desktop, as much as, for
instance, Fedora Silverblue or EndlessOS do. We just need to finish
putting it together. :-)
Thanks and Regards
--
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D
http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Virtualization Software Engineer
SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/
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participants (6)
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Dan Čermák -
Dario Faggioli -
Lil Frogg -
Mathias Homann -
Mathias Homann
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Syds Bearda