I recently got super curious about immutable OSes, so I decided to wipe the Tumbleweed install I had on one of my laptops and install MicroOS. I really like the architecture of the OS, it feels very clean, and it doesn’t use a lot of storage, but GNOME is estimating I’m going to get about 4 hours less battery life on average (it usually says 12 hours with me using a browser and word processor on TW, it’s saying 8 on Aeon) and although this laptop is pretty underpowered so slightly laggy performance is expected, it performances noticeably worse under Aeon than TW, despite the fact that I pretty much just use flatpaks for everything on TW too and containers have basically zero actual processing overhead, so there’s no technical reason Aeon should be slower. I don’t want to have to go through the hassle of switching back, but I feel like I might have to, so I’m just wondering why.
@openalexis Hi and welcome to the Forum 
Perhaps some hardware details would help, can you install inxi transactional-update pkg install inxi and reboot an post the output from;
inxi -Fxxz
Did you install any power management tools, eg tlp?
It is only a theory but I would suspect that TW is more optimised for laptops and energy performance.
MicroOS Aeon would be optimised for containers and virtualisation.
I bet all your cores are working at full speed regardless of the actual load.
Check it and see if that is the problem.
- I’ll get inxi installed and give you the output in a bit, I’m preparatorily downloading a Tumbleweed ISO right now so I need that to finish
- As for power management tools, I couldn’t get auto-cpufreq easily installed within a transactional-update, thanks to /usr/local/bin not existing, but this chasm of battery life exists even when I’ve wholesale put my computer in “power saving” mode, and the gap in performance exists even in “balanced” mode, so I’m not sure a power management tool would help here…
If that explains the gap in battery life, what explains the inexplicably terrible performance? That’s sort of what’s confusing me, it’s like I’m trapped between the two blades of a scissor in trying to figure out what’s going on lol. But also, it does appear that all four of my logical CPUs are just maxed out at all times, but I can’t figure out by what exactly. LibreWolf seems to be using the most CPU, but it’s only using about 122% of one core (so spilling out into others a bit I guess?) and LibreWolf was never a problem on TW
Oh weird. It looks like all my CPUs are somehow capped at 400Mhz even in performance mode, which explains why the performance is worse than it was under TW, but still doesn’t explain why the battery life is so terrible…
@openalexis If you need to work on the system (/etc is fine) outside of system package installs and dups, then you need to drop to the shell with transactional-update shell make your changes tweaks etc, then exit and reboot to the new snapshot.
Not seen that issue here on a Laptop (AMD dual GPU) and a tablet (Intel i5 low power) running Aeon…
Yeah I was installing auto-cpufreq in a transactional-update shell, Aeon is just missing /usr/local/bin, presumably because it’s been moved to /home/<usr>/bin. In any case, yeah I really have no idea what’s happening here. Honestly though, I’m probably gonna go back to TW anyway, just because it has snapshots too, and Aeon doesn’t bring the security benefits ostree-based immutable distros do, so there’s not much I’m gaining from being on Aeon versus something that I know works really nicely.
Also, I’m not really sure what point there is in getting my system specs here since I know it’s performing worse than TW, not even just performing badly on an absolute scale.
I know it’s rude to ask, but is this a Celeron N by any chance, the lower models below 5000 and 4000 series have this issue with many Linux distros.
No worries lol, but no, it’s an 8th gen intel core i5 that had no such problem on TW