Kalpa needs to attract more developers to keep up with Aeon’s pace. I understand it is usable as a daily driver, but it’s not just a one to one mirror of Aeon with Plasma on top.

https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-relate/

Richard Brown is all in on Aeon along with whatever contributors are helping him. Stephen Falken appears to have no one helping him work on Kalpa unfortunately. I disagree with Richard’s stance that Kalpa shouldn’t exist, but I do wish there were some capable people able to help that project.

I don’t mind using Gnome anyway, it actually does solve some networking issues that I’ve always had with Plasma. (Dolphin not handling it well whilst Gnome Files has no issues)

I’ve been using Opensuse Aeon just over a year and it’s done great.

Tumbleweed user for the last 5 years, and dealt with a few issues over that time. The usually infrequent update break that comes with rolling release. And the Opensuse ‘Patterns’ started, which I loathe and it’s a disaster to try to disable them every install.

Aeon hasn’t had any of those issues. It’s been very much a “turn it on and get to work”.

I’ve generally had less issues with Aeon than Tumbleweed - like certain flatpaks not crashing.

But downsides as I see them:

I’m not a gnome guy. It’s fine though, I don’t hate it. But some people can’t stand it.

I had a bit of trouble running wine. Something about the default security policy. There’s a known workaround.

I took it as a question of which distro looks nicest out of the box (like, which distro manager has made real effort to make something particularly nice looking).

I love how excited the red person is.

Blast Em. https://www.retrodev.com/blastem/

Standalone (not retro arch). Modern emulator (don’t think it’s updated anymore though). Linux support. I think it’s also available on Flathub if you want to get it via there.

Or…

Ares. https://ares-emu.net

Multi system emulator originally developed by Near (rip). Yes, it plays more systems than you are looking for, but it is simple, standalone (no retroarch/libretro), very good, Linux support, and still updated (latest version 23 Jan). Also available on Flathub if you want it there.

I suggest to try these emulators, they’re modern and they aim for cycle accuracy, rather than finding a way to keep a 15 year old emulator running.

Me. A flatpak Firefox means not adding a repo to install non-free codecs. A flatpak steam means not installing a hideous number of 32 bit libs. Can’t remember what software it is because I rarely use it, but another flatpak prevents me needing to build it from source.

I walk through the woods on one side of my house, there is a shovel behind some trees I’ve marked. Then I go back to my house, down the other side of my property until I get to the river. Then I dig in the river bank until I get to a plastic bag. Double wrapped of course.

Inside the plastic bag?.. a collection of 1gb USB thumb drives and a note pad.

In the note pad?.. an index cataloguing what is backed up on each thumb drive.

There’s a years old Debian-based version available for download, but the version that ships on Steam Deck is significantly different and based on Arch.

Windows xp was really bad, and a little thing called Ubuntu was gaining traction. So I guess just curiosity for what else was out there.