19 days ago I announced my plans here on Lemmy and after four weeks and ~300 hours in total, I can finally share the first ISO of my project with this community. “sometime next week” yeah that was optimistic lmao I want to thank you again for the feedback on the initial announcement and I can say I tried my best to address and implement a lot of your suggestions!
For the people that haven’t read the last post, this is the basic gist of it:
Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager and force you into sandboxes, Plutonium-239 keeps the core Arch experience intact. You still get the bleeding-edge Arch repositories and the power of the AUR but all of that with a 5-20% performance boost from a heavily optimized kernel and the peace of mind of an unbreakable safety net underneath.
For the ISO and the in-depth technical documentation, please visit my website at the link in the title!
The 0.0.1 version is a pre-release/in-development version meant for experienced people interested in this project. I tested it extensively and I’m running it for a few days now on my Thinkpad myself, however I can IN NO WAY guarantee that this is 100% viable to daily-drive just yet.
I’m very thankful for every person that considers testing this distro in a VM or on a secondary PC to contribute to the development of this project. Any feedback is appreciated and I hope my work can be of value to you!
A distro in just 300 hours? is it artisan coded or sloppadoppadoo?
Incredible lol
Well, it were four 80 hour weeks and I “only” reverse-engineered the way Fedora makes their distro atomic with ostree but adapted to Arch. I did try to stay true to the Arch philosophy of keeping it minimal otherwise so it wasn’t that big of a project!
Edit: Sometimes I had to spin up Qwen 3.8 27B because the error codes the installer threw out were literally humanly unreadable so I had no clue what even went wrong but other than that it was by hand lmao
LLMs are good for a few things. One of them is parsing human unreadable errors. I approve of this.
I don’t like black and white thinking and while I fucking hate LLMs in general, as 95% of times they are used for all the wrong reasons, I do have an Intel B70 for cases like these where current search engines just lead to nothing.