Looking at a Potential Phoenix?
Recently I wrote about my disbelief in how OpenSuse, in a time where Europe is debating sovereignty, is never ever even mentioned. But let's not hang around too much in that muddied pond, it looks like they are on their way back.
Reason for that optimism is my recent experience with Kalpa, the atomic KDE based on MicroOS. It taps into Tumbleweed for the latest software, it creates snapshots and thus rollbacks automagically, flathub and distrobox are installed ootb and it is Wayland-only.
What has changed? Kalpa used to have all this before, so what's new?
Well, there is now a dedicated website (https://kalpadesktop.org/) on Codeberg for the project. Not very extensive, but it has download links, documentation, tips and tricks and, most of all, its own identity.
When I first booted into KDE I was greeted by a styled SDDM and KDE theme. Might not be 100% to your liking, but I find it a big plus when a distribution tries to give their kid its own identity.
I quickly setup a distrobox of Tumbleweed (the default), and followed the instructions on the website for the setup of HomeBrew, which takes care of my terminal based applications.
Transactional update enabled me to remove things like Vlc, Discover and KDE Connect from my image. Read up on it, it's all documented.
And a snapshot restore saved my butt when I managed to not only de-install Qrca, but also all network connectivity ;-)
Ah, and do me a favor: let's get it out of that alpha status? This is way better than what a lot of 'stable' releases offer. Really!
All in all a solid experience and result, worth a try and what looks to be a very decent rising from the ashes.
