Thank you a lot for your interest! So as I pointed out in the other comments, out of the box and for the 0.0.1 release it’s intended to keep the system itself atomically updated through pacman and the user is advised to use flatpaks to install his applications. This is the most user friendly way of going about it, however I’m absolutely on your side and wouldn’t use it that way myself. 0.0.2 will have a way to “unlock” it so you can use the distro like vanilla Arch BUT you get peace of mind from knowing that you have a failsafe way of knowing the system will not break.

For the name, I did want Arch-Atomic at first but noticed this would violate the Arch Linux trademark policy and just went with my favorite isotope as a placeholder that unfortunately grew onto me. I will get off the couch now and edit the website so it’s apparent that Pu-239 is just the shorthand and people will refer to it as Plutonium-239 or just plain Plutonium in the future!

Second comment because I just remembered: my initial idea was to simply call it Arch-Atomic, but just the fact of being atomic alone already would violate their trademark policy, which is why I went with my favorite isotope!

Haha, good thing to point out, however my plan is to make the second release able to be “unlocked” so you can pretty much treat it like vanilla Arch Linux but with a failsafe atomic way of the updates being applied. Being immutable is just the default configuration. Think of it more like Arch-Atomic but I couldn’t choose that name due to their trademark policy.

Damn that sounds like a pain in the ass. Yeah, I personally have btrfs snapshots set up on my main workstation and had to use them once, but I just envision having peace of mind that you won’t even noticing that something broke.

Although unintuitiv, judging by the name, hopefully less toxic too!

Jup, I DO use AI and bought an Intel B70 to run stuff locally with my own llama.cpp-sycl AUR package, but just to automate meaningless and tedious work. For example I have a .sh script that I run once and compile all four kernel versions and push them to my website automatically. That .sh is completely vibe-coded locally, the only person I could harm by that is myself haha. That way I can save time and pay attention to the actually relevant stuff. But vibe-coding stuff that could harm the user’s experience is a hard no for me.

Currently you can select either KDE Plasma or Gnome in the calamares installer and other than that it just slaps Intel and AMD CPU firmware on it along with Intel, AMD and NVIDIA drivers so yeah, a boated but working list of packages. I thought about making a quick tick-box solution but decided to just make it work right in the first place and get a proper hardware-detection going. The first version will be shipped with just that, for 0.0.2 to be released, I want it to have that kind of developer access where you can add or remove the packages you want, just like on a pre-configured Arch distro. That’s the first priotity after the initial release so thank you for your interest and I hope you will be happy with it in the future!!

Hmm, I will definitely take your suggestion to heart. For now I’ll focus on actually getting the first ISO ready to be rolled out, after that I’ll take a deeper look into it, thank you!

My initial idea was to just literally reverse-engineer the way SteamOS does it but when I saw what a mess this was I looked at a few other distros and how Fedora Silverblue used ostree seemed the most intuitive for me to program so yeah, that’s pretty much the reason haha. Are you just asking for clarification or do you think bootc has some advantages that you care to explain? Now would be the perfect time as the only machines running this are my ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and two friends on their spare laptops.

Jup, you got it right, the “easier and accessible” part just arises as a byproduct of making Arch atomic. By nature this will make the install pre-configured and thus easier to get into even if this isn’t even the goal but rather just stability and peace of mind.

Hmm, in my head I’m pretty set on Plutonium already, but I will take your advice and make the written out name more prominently visible so people will hopefully develop the habit of refering to it as “Plutonium”. If I should decide to have multiple spins on it, I’ll remember that Hesperium and such are cool alternate names, thank you for the ideas!

Thank you for the comment! Omarchy is pretty much just a facists vibe-coded Hyprland rice shipped as a distro used for money-laundering while I try to provide something useful that bridges a gap between stability and performance. Scroll down to the disclaimer section, click on the link and see me struggling to make an ugly logo instead of asking an AI lmao

I’ll just mostly copy the comment above because it answers my intentions:

I have NEVER had less issues with an OS ever since running Arch and/or CachyOS, however issues COULD arise and that is enough for the usual Reddit dickhead to talk someone who’s asking for their first distro out of using anything Arch based. I’m tired of hearing these fucking “no you can’t recommend CachyOS, a new user should not touch Arch”, “CachyOS will break three times within your first week of using it”, “it has the AUR so you will contract HIV instantly by using it”, I just can’t hear it anymore which is why I want to provide people with an option that still has them on an Arch based distro but with added peace of mind and speed optimizations out of the box. You know, that’s the thing, I personally find Arch easy and intuitive and don’t get where people get the idea that it breaks all the time from, but that IS the perception however.

I’m completely on your side, I have NEVER had less issues with an OS ever since running Arch and/or CachyOS, however issues could arise and that is enough for the usual Reddit dickhead to talk someone who’s asking for their first distro out of using anything Arch based. I’m tired of hearing these fucking “no you can’t recommend CachyOS, a new user should not touch Arch”, “CachyOS will break three times within your first week of using it”, “it has the AUR so you will contract HIV instantly by using it”, I just can’t hear it anymore which is why I want to provide people with an option that still has them on an Arch based distro but with added peace of mind and speed optimizations out of the box. You know, that’s the thing, I personally find Arch easy and intuitive and don’t get where people get the idea that it breaks all the time from, but that IS the perception however.

Honestly, for the packages I do agree. You are not going to notice if your damn font is compiled with v3 flags or not lmao. The kernels however do apply a meaningful improvement, even if it’s just in general desktop use, you DO notice the jump from 250Hz to 1000Hz. Currently I’ll just ship the regular linux-cachyos kernel with the EEVDF scheduler which is more general purpose, but if you select BORE for gaming or (I forgot the name) for throughput, it becomes even more apparent. I get almost a minute shaved off compiling the kernels when I use a good kernel!

The frontend isn’t even the goal, I won’t even be adding this at all unless it’s an often requested feature. Currently you can select KDE Plasma or Gnome during your install and both ship pretry much vanilla except for the distro’s logo and fastfetch. It’s intended to behave like SteamOS from a back-end perspective for lack of a better word!

I do plan to have a way too “unlock” it so you can for example enter a console command to be able to install packages like vanilla Arch but they still get applied atomically. I dislike Flatpaks myself so for me to use it on my main workstation, I’d have to be able to never touch a flatpak as well haha. For the average user that wants a “just works” distro like SteamOS but also some of the speed-up from CachyOS, Flatpaks seem like the most intuitive decision however.

Man, good question, I’m still torn about this. Initially I was forced to use GitHub specifically from my university, now it kind of stuck. I haven’t pushed much yet anyway so I might even make the switch.

I both hate this so much and respect the creativity lmao

Nope, I don’t find it that hard either, but we are in a bubble here. The average “which distro should I pick” post suggests SteamOS but only with a full AMD system and when people suggest CachyOS, it’s met with “bUt YOu cAN’t sUgGesT aN ArcH bASeD diStrO tO a BegInNer” so I hope to bridge the gap for people that are waiting for a general-purpose SteamOS release PLUS the CachyOS performance on top. Also some distros do offer people to add the CachyOS repos, which is however forbidden due to their repo policy. Yes it is open source, but they understandably don’t want their servers and mirrors to be used by people not even running their distro. As I will compile the kernels for now, ALL packages in the future and host them myself, I actually comply with their repo policy as one of the few distros.