Review: openSUSE's MicroOS
I want to acknowledge the MicroOS documentation does warn that the desktop roles of the distribution are still in development. We shouldn't expect an entirely polished experience. Still, despite this warning, I was surprised at how poorly the MicroOS system functioned. I could understand some things not working smoothly, such as Discover not adding application launchers to the menu automatically. However, getting pestered with checksum errors (15 or more of them) during the initial install seems excessive. It was all the more frustrating that the installer doesn't respect the "don't ask me again" option after it shows the checksum errors.
The login screen blanks and causes the system to stop responding if we don't login fast enough, the first window that greets the user upon logging in isn't a welcome window, but a crash report. There is very little software on the system and the Discover software centre crashes after almost every transaction.
With all of these things going wrong, the only theoretical benefit appears to be that we can install (and rollback) software updates, making for a more stable rolling release experience. Which is a good idea and I'm not knocking it, but we can already enjoy this with openSUSE Tumbleweed and its automatic Btrfs snapshots without any of the hassles which come from running MicroOS. The Tumbleweed edition will even let us use Zypper and includes more desktop software out of the box.
MicroOS has some appealing ideas, like snapshots, a read-only root filesystem, and roles we can select at install time. However, it's a lot less polished than openSUSE's other editions and, from a practical point of view, doesn't offer much benefit over the Btrfs snapshots of the other editions.