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.
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!
I’m honestly so trolled, I hate change & hate the idea that something might be better than my existing Arch install. I hate that security, reliability, and flexibility are improved. I cope by reminding myself that I’m very low on disk space right now, for the needed extra partitions
If you have a spare homelab machine Fedora does an immutable build called IoT (they branded it wrong it’s just a barebones install appropriate for servers also).
What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That’s sad…
Linux click bait Lv.999
I’m a bit behind on these immutable distros and have a small question. People keep saying you can just switch to another image if you want to switch desktop environments. But how does this solve the problem of the config files of the various DEs (GTK rc files or other theme stuff) messing with each other in the home directory? Because this was always a pain in the ass in normal distros
Switching DEs is not recommended by devs so I assume the configs are still conflicting. Home dir doesn’t get affected by an image rebase most likely.
I’ve switched between Plasma, Cosmic, Sway, and Hyprland without any conflicts. For the Plasma 5->6 transition it did change my config in a way that broke Plasma 5 when I rolled back, so problems are possible.
Basically your mileage may vary.
But how does this solve the problem of the config files of the various DEs (GTK rc files or other theme stuff) messing with each other in the home directory?
It does not. Your dotfiles will be a bit wrecked when you rebase. See: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/why-is-rebasing-between-desktop-environments-bad/690/4 It’ll also cause random issues like: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/flatpak-apps-crashing-after-rebasing-from-silverblue-to-kinoite/83623/2
It’s mostly plasma fighting gnome, though. I haven’t seen any conflicts with say, sway.
Your files are a mutable part, they stick around for rebase and rollback. (I believe /etc also.) If it’s only files in a home directory you could try a different DE by making a new user. But yeah I don’t think it has a built-in solution for something like that.
I guess you just have to use home manager on NixOS
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
Congratulations. You have completed Linux. Please prepare a usb installer for Haiku to move on to the next step of your jouney.
You need to install a rootkit ASAP.
AAMOF, I install Fedora Kinoite (Like silverblue but KDE plasma) to people coming from windows, first GNU/Linux Experience.Practically unbreakable. does its work.
11 months later …
NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp
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
If installing the surface kernel (kind of necessary for my Surface Go 1) and installing a few appimages didn’t look so difficult, I guess I would already be on Silverblue.
I’m kind of the opposite of OP and just having nightmares about breaking my system 😅
That’s why I’m doing clonezilla backup but I think the custom kernel would be a problem if I reinstall on another non-Surface computer. Maybe I should just go back to the normal kernel before doing a backup…
If the kernel is available in a COPR or another third party repo, you can just do a little swapping with rpm-ostree: https://github.com/openshift/os/blob/master/docs/faq.md#q-how-do-i-replace-the-current-kernel-with-kernel-rt-or-a-new-kernel-version-in-rhcos
Edit: Just in case this is the project you’re using, here’s specific install instructions for Fedora Silverblue: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup#fedora-silverblue
Seems a bit too complicated for me, even if it probably ain’t.
But I’d probably use it if one day I break my Fedora workstation install.
Oh it’s definitely over-complicated, and contrary to what others say here, Silverblue can definitely have some very difficult to troubleshoot problems (especially when using things outside the direct Fedora ecosystem), which are greatly worsened by rpm-ostree taking 15 years to do anything despite sharing code with the supposedly lighting-quick dnf5. For servers, rpm-ostree is great (it’s in all of RH k8s offerings, see RHCOS), but on desktops, there’s definitely a good reason why RH has to apparent offering and Fedora calls theirs “emerging”. Still miles better than having an unbootable system after updating.
I’ve been running Bazzite based on silverblue on my desktop for remote gaming and dockering. Everything was amazing until I started doing some mid-level docker stuff because of the rigidity of the distro.
Podman largely works but since it’s rootless it won’t have access to mounted drives easily due to SELinux.
Mounting a drive automatically wasn’t intuitive either and I ended up editing the /etc/fstab manually.
Setting up a swapfile was also tedious, I needed more than 8GB so I made a 32GB swapfile but I still had to run a sudo command on startup since I’m not really confident with creating a systemd service on an immutable distro.
All in all I should have just gone for Nobara or a regular Fedora but that’s because I have a really edge use-case.
That being said I still highly recommend it. It’s stable, easy to “rebase-hop” and everything just works well and it’s very stable. I’d recommend it for pretty much anyone unless you’re going to do some heavy self hosting with multiple HDs.
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.
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.
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 had an entirely different experience with Bazzite. It would not boot to Wayland after an update, so I had to boot to xorg, reboot, and then wayland would work, until the last update where Wayland just wouldn’t work anymore, so I ended up going back to Fedora Workstation.
