Richard Brown: MicroOS Desktop, The Road to Daily Driving
openSUSE Chairman and MicroOS Release Engineer Richard Brown presented OpenSUSE's minimal MicroOS Linux distribution as a potential desktop operating system at the openSUSE+LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 last week in a half an hour long presentation. MicroOS is a minimal Linux distribution primarily made for cloud services, IoT devices, containers and those types of use-cases. It could potentially also be used as a light desktop system similar to ChromeOS and an alpha version of MicroOS for Desktop is available. There are some problems to be solved on the road to a stable release as Richard Brown explains.
written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung) 2020-09-23 - last edited 2020-10-23. © CC BY
Video Copyright 2020 Richard Brown / openSUSE+LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
"The desktop operating systems we've been using for the last decades require far too much effort to maintain. What we need is a simple desktop that can be given to anyone, that always updates itself, that always repairs itself, and while the base system might always be up to date, users should be able to get to pick whatever apps they want to on top of it.
This is the basic premise of the MicroOS Desktop which came to life at oSC 2019 and is now in an Alpha state offered as part of the MicroOS installation ISO for both Intel and ARM architectures.
This session will demonstrate the current state of the MicroOS Desktop, discuss future plans and invite more contributors and users to get involved with this new generation of desktop linux."
Users of traditional Linux desktop systems may be a bit uncomfortable with a simpler system with a read-only root file system that updates itself automatically, automatically reboots when needed and generally leaves most of the underlying details to the system developers, not the end-user. That's how MicroOS Desktop will work. Yet those things make some sense if you consider it as an alternative to operating systems like Android and ChromeOS.
You may also be interested in Richard Brown's "Regular Releases are Wrong, Roll for your life" talk at this years openSUSE+LibreOffice conference.
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