A Real Aeon Desktop Review
A review of Aeon Desktop by someone who uses it as a daily driver.
It’s Just Aeon
It’s a common belief that Aeon is an openSUSE project, its not, Aeon is it’s own thing.
Aeon is made by Richard Brown an employee at SUSE, and wearer of green wigs.
There is confusion about Aeon being an openSUSE project is due to a combination of multiple things.
- The main page features a video titled “openSUSE Aeon – Desktop Linux finally done right?“.
- On most openSUSE support forums and chats if you need help with Aeon you will receive it.
- Richard Brown spoke about Aeon at openSUSE events.
- Aeon uses openSUSE infrastructure.
A Modern Distribution
Aeon is a fast, rolling-release, immutable distribution designed for modern devices, and it truly “just works”.
TPM2 & Full Disk Encryption
Aeon by default enables full disk encryption, and it will automatically unlock your encrypted partition using your device’s built-in TPM2. A passphrase given to you on install is used as backup.
The way TPM2 is used is smart and secure, so if your device is tampered with the encrypted partition will not unlock automatically and asks for a passphrase instead.
If a thief stole your device but didn’t tamper with it and tried booting like normal they will still need the password for the user account.
Rarely, after an update has been applied, you’ll be required to enter your passphrase and re-measure boot integrity, which is a little inconvenient but certainly not a deal breaker. This also means you always need to have your passphrase at hand.
Updating Aeon
Aeon updates are very straight forward and simple, so simple that you don’t need to worry about them!
Between 12:00 AM and 2:00 AM every day, Aeon will automatically check for updates. You won’t notice anything running and if an update is found you’ll receive a notification after it finishes. To apply the update just reboot. That’s it!
Rolling Back
In the unlikely event that a system update causes issues, Aeon includes a rollback feature that lets you return to a working state in under five minutes.
Personally, this eliminates “update anxiety” for me, I never worry about rebooting and my install being unusable, since I can always rollback.
App Installation
Aeon uses Flatpak for app installation and has Flathub setup by default.
If you need anything outside of Flathub, Aeon has Distrobox installed by default which allows you to export apps to your desktop. I found combining it with DistroShelf eliminates most of the pain of remembering how to use Distrobox.
AppImages on Aeon sometimes won’t work, but you can run them using Distrobox if you need to.
If you really need something installed to the base system you can do that with sudo transactional-update pkg install <package_name> but don’t expect to get any support from the Aeon community if you do.
Bloat?
Well honestly there is none. After installation is finished you might notice how few pre-installed apps there are.
Aeon is super bare-bones which in my opinion is a good thing. It give you room to mold it into what you need, instead of spending hours removing unneeded packages and risk breaking the system.
Daily Usage
I’ve been daily driving Aeon for a few months already and so far it’s been a great experience besides a few hiccups.
I want you to know that I haven’t tested in a virtual machine for a few minutes and called it a day. I use Aeon everyday on my main device. I’m writing this review from Aeon.
In this section, I’ll review my experience with Aeon based on my daily tasks. I won’t comment on tasks I don’t perform.
Web browsing & Video Playback
I use Firefox from Flathub. Aeon handles this perfectly without any issue. There is no stuttering and my laptop doesn’t get hot even with lots of tabs open. I’ve made sure to test hardware video decoding and that works!
For YouTube I use FreeTube from Flathub and after tweaking the FreeTube “.desktop” file to enable hardware video decoding it has been working well. I want it to be clear that tweaking FreeTube for hardware video decoding is no fault of Aeon but FreeTube itself.
For other videos outside of YouTube I use VLC from Flathub and that works perfectly also with hardware video decoding working!
The one downside I found is Stremio from Flathub doesn’t work on Aeon.
Gaming
I use Heroic from Flathub for gaming and that has also been a very good experience!
Through WINE or Linux native, my games run very smoothly. I use a Dualsense controller paired with Bluetooth for playing my games and that has given me no issues.
I also use Flashpoint with a Distrobox container. Distrobox allows me to set it up like a native app, and it runs smoothly.
One issue I do have, which might be unrelated to Aeon, is when I plug my monitor and I want to use the monitor speakers, the audio won’t work specifically under WINE games. If I close the game the audio returns. I have to mess audio settings every time I want to use the speakers. Sometime this will happen without the monitor and my audio will randomly stop working while I’m playing a game under WINE.
Photo editing
I use GIMP from Flathub, but before I get into talking about it you should know that I’m not a professional photo editor, I’m not even an amateur, I just make sticker packs for fun.
I’ll keep this simple and brief. GIMP on Aeon runs well, as expected. I’ve been able to do everything I need without any problem!
Miscellaneous
I’ll keep this section brief and answer questions you might have.
I am not developer so I cannot make any comments about how good developing is on Aeon.
I do not use office applications so I cannot make any comments about how good office applications work on Aeon.
Doing basic tasks on Aeon like listening to music, writing something in text editor, using messaging applications, ect,. Aeon works just as well as any other Linux distribution.
The Negatives Of Aeon
I want to be clear about a few things before we continue.
- Aeon is in RC, it is not a stable release so bugs are expected.
- I understand that some issues are outside of the project’s control and the tools Aeon uses have issues, but that doesn’t mean these issues aren’t affecting Aeon.
Aeon has been a very good experience but like any distribution there will be issues.
Currently, Aeon laptops must be plugged in for automatic updates to work, otherwise the automatic update will fail. This is an issue because, if you close the lid and go to sleep at 10:00 PM with your laptop unplugged. Once you open it the update will fail because it is unplugged, so you must plug in the laptop before opening the lid for the automatic update to work.
(This has been fixed since writing) On some installs when you need to re-measure boot integrity you will not be able to, forcing you to re-enroll the TPM2.
Re-measuring boot integrity is annoying. It’s setup in such a way where it will surprise you the first time you need to do it since it’s unexpected. The need for it isn’t explained anywhere during install or after install.
Some bugs are slow to fix and will stick around for months with users reports piling on. In the Aeon’s defense it seems that Richard is doing most of the fixes himself, and that is difficult to do when you need to balance your life.
NVIDIA GPU users shouldn’t expect any help.
Conclusion
Aeon does what it advertises on the homepage, it’s minimal, fast, reliable, and stays out your way.
In my opinion, if openQA tests get written and bugs are fixed, Aeon will be more reliable than Windows or macOS.
If you like Aeon you can find a download link here and an installation guide from the official Aeon wiki here.
The Aeon wiki page will likely have the solution to any issues you experience.
Are you are a developer with free time? Aeon needs help with writing openQA tests to move out of RC, or you can help with fixing bugs on Bugzilla.