Version: 20251021
Rating: 9
Date: 2025-10-31
Votes: 16
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I've been using Aeon Desktop on my HP Pavilion Aero laptop for close to a year. It is an immutable, rolling-release distribution with a small footprint: the base OS basically consists of the Linux kernel, Systemd, Wayland, GNOME desktop, and not much else. It is technically possible to install additional software in the base OS, but this is not recommended unless absolutely necessary (like hardware drivers).
Installation of Aeon Desktop is simple and doesn't offer many options. Notably, the installer doesn't support dual-boot.
Aeon comes with a "stock" GNOME desktop, where nothing is customized except the wallpaper and accent color. The default selection of apps is delightfully minimal, but can be extended from a slightly larger list during installation. Almost all apps are flatpaks, including the default web browser (Firefox), so they can be installed or removed later in GNOME Software. By the way, GNOME Software is really fast on Aeon, probably because it's configured to only install flatpaks (from Flathub) and firmware updates.
For non-flatpak applications and command-line tools, Aeon recommends to use Distrobox. Distrobox is a tool to create Linux containers for any distribution you like, and is very easy to use. By default, Aeon creates a preconfigured OpenSUSE Tumbleweed container when you first run "distrobox enter". I installed the packages I need in the container with zypper, and setup the terminal to enter this distrobox by default.
Some applications are not available on Flathub or in a Distrobox. For example, I do a lot of software development on this laptop, mainly using IntelliJ IDEA, and even though IDEA can be installed from Flathub, it's hindered a lot by the sandbox. So I downloaded the application directly from JetBrains' website, put it somewhere in my home directory, and created a shortcut that executes it from my default Distrobox container. This works flawlessly. The same can be done with apps distributed as an AppImage.
There's one area where Aeon disappoints, and that is the fragility of the full-disk encryption. Initially it works well enough, but sometimes, in my case after a firmware update, the system suddenly refuses to boot until I enter a *very long* passphrase and then do a "TPM re-enrollment", as described in the Aeon documentation under "Advanced encryption". This is disappointing for a distribution that claims to "just work".
Speaking of "just works", my favorite Aeon feature is how it automatically maintains itself in the background. There's a daily systemd service that downloads the latest system updates and installs them into a new btrfs filesystem snapshot. The running system is not changed, until the next restart boots into the new snapshot.
Besides the base OS, Aeon also automatically upgrades packages in all Distrobox containers, and GNOME Software auto-updates all installed flatpak apps and runtimes.
It's hard to overstate how nice this is. Aeon offers the latest and greatest software versions, but at the same time, I never manually start updates, and I never have to sit around waiting for updates to install, except for firmware updates. I literally don't have to care about updates anymore, but still my laptop is always on the newest Linux and GNOME versions.
Long story short, I really like Aeon. I love it's minimal selection of packages so I can install just the apps I need. I like the vanilla GNOME environment and appreciate that Aeon kept it that way. I quickly became used to working with Distrobox. I especially like the automatic maintenance of the system.
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