So I took the plunge and installed Fedora Silverblue because of all that immutable buzz. And it’s the most frustrating change I have made in almost 20 years of my distrohopping.
After installing Silverblue I configured it as usual. I installed necessary flatpaks, played with toolbox and distrobox, installed codecs, configured my bluetooth keyboard and other stuff in /etc and /var. Applied some useful tweaks I found on the web and… well… everything works. Nothing to do anymore. No issues. Nothing breaks, no dependency hell, everything runs smooth. I have nothing to tweak, tinker or configure anymore. So frustrating.
Every update is just… meh. Smooth, new, fresh system not affected by my stupid tweaking and breaking. Booooring.
I don’t have to distrohop anymore. If I want other distros I can just install them in distrobox. Other versions of apps? Something from AUR perhaps…? No problem. What’s the point of distrohopping now? Other DEs? I just rebase my system to other images with almost any DE or WM I want without losing data or messing everything up (damn you, UBlue!).
I don’t even have to reinstall the damn thing cause every time I update the system or rebase it to another image it’s like reinstalling it.
Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.
11 months later …
NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp
Can you still install extensions in GNOME? I hate the defaults
Yes but only from Gnome directly with an app called extensions manager. You came install them from the Fedora repo.
Thank you!
Oh, you!
After beginning to wrap my head around atomic immutable OSes, I can’t believe they’re not the standard for most servers. i can’t believe Debian doesn’t have an official atomic and immutable version yet, seems exactly like the kind of stability they aim for
I don’t fully understand how silverblue and kinoite are different, but I feel this way with base Fedora KDE. I’ve never broken it even a little bit when that used to be common with Ubuntu based distros for whatever reason.
Silverblue and Kionite are both Ublue distros, one has gnome and other KDE. One nice thing is that you can just swap between gnome and KDE without breaking anything via rebasing.
isn’t the opposite?, fedora started ostree, ublue came after
How does that work exactly?
I don’t know tons of the detail but I understand the principle. The immutable part of the system is really just an applied oci container image for any ublue based distro.
Certain mount points are writable and persisted (e.g.
/home), but otherwise you can just reimage the entire system with any compatible (ublue based) image. Then each image is built by layering changes using ostree. So that’s how you get the different distros.Silverblue is ublue with gnome, kinoite is ublue with KDE, Bazzite layers steam, proprietary Nvidia drivers and other stuff mainly gaming related, etc.
System updates (which tend to be regular) are just applying an updated image, so actually updating is effectively the same as rebasing.
You can also yourself add ostree layers on top of the base image, and if you rebase to a different one your layers get reapplied on top.
I wrote a thing about this earlier: Fedora has apparently been infected with an advertising department. Their website has a lot of branding and buzzwords and wanketeering and very few technical details. It never says the word Gnome anywhere. You just have to know “Workstation” and “Silverblue” mean Gnome.
What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That’s sad…
AAMOF, I install Fedora Kinoite (Like silverblue but KDE plasma) to people coming from windows, first GNU/Linux Experience.Practically unbreakable. does its work.
As A Matter Of Fact, I had to google that because I’ve never seen anyone use that abbreviation.
I’ve been considering it for a while but my main setup (knock on wood) has been rock solid with traditional fedora. If I ever end up switching distros silverblue is probably going to be it.
Been worth it to learn it and change my way of thinking.
update: Should’ve knocked harder, fedora 40 broke on my PC so I guess I’m switching to silverblue lmao
I’m in the same boat, Kinoite (or rather my own blue build of it) killed my distro-hopping. But fans of Arch might be interested in the upcoming immutable arch-based OS: BlendOS
Finally a real world manual.
Plug your USB in and spam that key while turning on your PC.
Arkane linux exist, it’s arch linux, and atomic using btrfs
Thanks! I had not heard about it.
It seems to only consider GNOME as the official DE and seem to not have the “blend” integrations of different distro.
Might not be for me but I appreciate the reply and it might help others.
I remember having a great experience with it, sorry yours hasn’t been great
I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It’s fantastically boring
Oh man. I’m so sorry for your loss. May your system break at some vague point in the future in a way that is nigh impossible to diagnose and that no one else seems to have experienced. Godspeed, you unwillingly content penguin!
that the thing, if it breaks, the roolback is there or simply rebase without merging /etc, so basically a factory reset
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
feels like this post was sponsored by Anne Hathaway
I rebase quite often, its the better distrohopping.
Have a look at Fedora Discuss, interesting things there.
What does rebasing mean in this context? I try to google it, but all I get is git rebase.
Any articles about it that are worth reading? Or if you can explain, that would be neat. Thanks!
Its the same :D
Rebasing refers to an OSTree remote which is like a git repo, but with binaries and producing bootable systems. There are some differences there.
The idea is: there is a remote that has the exact wanted configuration, your system mirrors it. All the package manager does is similar to
git pull.If you rebase, you switch the upstream remote, and your system gets the diffs, downloads them.
The cool thing is, that these updates are atomic, so you stay on the current system and the rebased one is only set as the system you boot in after a reboot. You can still
sudo ostree admin pin 0before rebasing, and your current system will be saved forever to switch back to.Note that /etc is writable so you might still accumulate duplicate or redundant configs.
It’s a command provided by the OS to distrotop between ublue distros. You can basically hop between silverblue, Kionite and Bazzite with a single command.
So, this is only available for Fedora users?
ostree based distros*, the default fedora don’t use ostree so you can’t rebase, bazzite is not fedora but they also use ostree, so you rebase there
I have so much to learn. Last time I was tracking distros and having fun with distro hopping was with Slackware 7, I think.
What is ostree? What is bazzite? Time to google stuff.
