Post #4820018 · Elektrine

2026-09-23 15:33 UTC

Plutonium-239 - Arch Linux made unbreakable and lightning fast. Initial in-development release, announced here on Lemmy first. 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!

Replies (16)

@helix@feddit.org 2026-09-23 15:38

Finally! I know what I’ll try over the weekend after I made backups 😇

Open ##4820068
@luthis@lemmy.nz 2026-09-23 15:40

How are you measuring the performance boost? In what areas does it apply?

Open ##4820087
@Vitaly@feddit.uk 2026-09-23 16:13

Looks cool! Why was it called plutonium?

Open ##4820452
@swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-09-23 17:02

Looks cool, I’ll drop this on my Thinkpad tonight when I get home from work.

Open ##4820840
@Amaterasu@lemmy.world 2026-09-23 17:41

Apologizes, not sure if I followed, what makes it atomic?

Open ##4821122
@geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 2026-09-23 22:50

A distro in just 300 hours? is it artisan coded or sloppadoppadoo?

Open ##4823658
@byungyoonc@piefed.ca 2026-09-23 23:02

Ayy, cachyos kernel with ostree atomic model, and minimal LLM involvement? Sounds like the next distro I will try :D Thanks for the works!

Open ##4823780
@crunchpaste@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-09-23 23:54

Does it come with KDE preinstalled or is that just for the screenshot? I’d love to give it a try on my secondary laptop as it sounds just great, but I really can’t stand KDE.

Open ##4824177
@WellTheresYourCobbler@hexbear.net 2026-09-24 01:38

This is pretty cool!

Open ##4824858
@piter9@lemmy.zip 2026-09-24 09:48

I really like the idea behind this project, I don’t usually try random distros but this caught my eye, I might put on my laptop. Also good job not supporting big tech AI and vibe-coding :)

Open ##4828834
@mactan@lemmy.ml 2026-09-24 10:26

not that anything stands a chance anymore but lol, another project that doesn’t care about ever being found by search engine. right up there with “matrix” and “riot”

Open ##4829214
@jjlinux@lemmy.zip 2026-09-24 12:00

I was just finishing this quarter’s distro-hop frenzy, but seeing as you are apparently using Lemmy as your network platform as opposed to fucking discord or similar crap, I think I’ll give this a shot for sure. Thanks, we need more devs with this train of thought.

Open ##4830250
@defrostedLasagna4921@piefed.zip 2026-09-24 20:54

How similar is this to CachyOS? Can the experience essentially be like CachyOS but atomic?

Open ##4835893
@ColdWater@lemmy.ca 2026-09-25 00:37

If you can provide one without any DE that would be nice

Open ##4837991
@kuro@piefed.social 2026-09-25 15:42

I will try this on my Thinkpad this weekend. Thank you for making it. Is there any way in contributing to it?

Open ##4845367
@sudo@programming.dev 2026-09-28 16:51

Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager Direct pacman use is blocked. /usr/bin/pacman is a wrapper around pacman-real Regardless, I do support attempts to make an immutable and declarative Arch distro. An an ostree implementation on Arch is an interesting experiment. You might want to check out Darch which boots from container images.

Open ##4885088