Kalpa is great and hits way above its alpha status; I've been running it on my laptop for months now with zero issues. It's been really nice to not have to worry about updates, just gotta reboot it every now and then and most things just work.
Kalpa is great and hits way above its alpha status; I've been running it on my laptop for months now with zero issues. It's been really nice to not have to worry about updates, just gotta reboot it every now and then and most things just work.
Which things do not "just work"?
I can't think of anything that doesn't just work in that it's broken in some way. There are things that are different. I've been using MicroOS with Plasma for at least 4 years now on my personal machine and my work laptop. At some point they changed the name to Kalpa. There were some times in there where things were broken and it needed to roll back and pause automatic updates for a few days, but otherwise it functions just as expected.
A couple of annoyances exist. For example IDEs want to use the system's shell, so you have to make a custom entry to use your distrobox. Tools like python, node, tofu, etc are installed in a distrobox and then exported with `distrobox-export -b $(which $BINARY)` so that you can call them from the IDE.
For me, it's worth those few rough edges. When I install an OS for non-technical people who just need a web browser, I install Kalpa. It looks close enough to Windows to be easy to use, and it's never broken in a way I can't explain over the phone or a text how to fix.
It even passed the wife test in our house. It took a few years of marriage to convince her that her laptop shouldn't take 30 minutes to boot and open Chrome. She let me switch her over to Kalpa (it may have still been called MicroOS Desktop then) a few years back. That old laptop is still kicking and fast enough for her needs. Had she stuck with Windows, it'd be a brick now because of the requirements for upgrading to W10 and 11.