What this is
Aeon Desktop is an openSUSE MicroOS-based Linux distribution built around an immutable system design — the core OS is read-only, and everything you add lives in containers or transactional layers on top of it.
It led me to Distrobox, which led to containerized development environments, which led to a completely different way of thinking about what a workstation can and should be.
Why it exists
I fell for the immutable vision. The idea that the base system stays clean, stable, and reproducible — and that all the messy, experimental, personal stuff happens in isolated containers that you can throw away — was exactly the mental model I had been looking for without knowing it.
Distrobox opened that door further. Suddenly I had a reason to experiment with different shell configurations, terminal tooling, and workflows inside throwaway containers until they were good enough to become daily drivers. That process became my dotfiles.
Current state
- Aeon running on my laptop, lightly customized and in daily use
- PBS integration via a Proxmox Backup Client running inside a Distrobox — the laptop backs up into the same PBS infrastructure as the rest of the lab
- Terminal tooling and dotfiles were born out of Distrobox experiments: try it in a container, keep what works, discard what does not
- MakeMKV running for Blu-ray backups, which opened the door to the automatic media ripper project
- Moving more workloads into Docker as the setup matures
- Current focus is lighter use on Aeon while CySA+, Net+, and MS Learn projects run in parallel
What I am figuring out
- Full workstation conversion: the laptop is the test bed, the desktop is still the question
- The userspace project runs alongside Aeon and is platform agnostic — Linux and Windows. It is the human-centric side of the stack: the data and tooling layer built to be simple, flexible, and purpose-driven, the same philosophy as layering service and application VMs cleanly under a Proxmox cluster. If CUE-Verse is the tech side of the tech-human relationship, the userspace project is the human side.
- The automatic media ripper project growing out of MakeMKV
- Where Docker workloads live long term: on Aeon itself, or handed off to the cluster