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!
that the thing, if it breaks, the roolback is there or simply rebase without merging /etc, so basically a factory reset
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.
isn’t the opposite?, fedora started ostree, ublue came after
Welcome to the very reason I’ll never ever try Silveblue 😄
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.
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…
You can make your own silverblue image with your custom kernel ;)
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.
oh, the 15 years to do anything is true, i know when my system is updating in the background just from the sound of my laptop fan lol, but they do a 3-way merge using the remote image, your overlays and your /etc, so it’s a intensive process i guess
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
Can you still install extensions in GNOME? I hate the defaults
Yes but only from Gnome directly with an app called extensions manager. You can’t install them from the Fedora repo.
Thank you!
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).
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Two days ago my Mint system got borked by a kernel update. I booted from the grub menu with the prior kernel, and rolled back with Timeshift. Pretty painless. You don’t need Atomic/immutable distros for that sort of reliability.
I’m playing with kinoite in a VM, though.
Depends what you break. Sure kernels are easy to fix like you mention, but what if you bork your display manager?
Can’t you run timeshift from a live usb? Never tried, but i believe its possible. Obviously more time consuming and bothersome, but possible.
I actually don’t know whether timeshift can just run easily from a live USB, but I don’t see why not.
But of course that also requires you to have installed and set up timeshift before (which is obviously a good idea)
It’s quite a different deal when the whole operating system it built around a timeshift-like concept.
Installed Aurora the other day (distro based on kinoite) and could not make my bank software run… It is a “local” (ie, only used by banks in my country) software only available for Ubuntu that requires a systemd service. Tried a lot and couldn’t get it to work. The service started, but the browser accused it was not installed.
Is your browser installed as a Flatpak?
Chromium yes. But firefox was shipped with the distro, so I am guessing it is not flatpak, but not sure.
nop, sadly, i unistalled it and installed from flatpak
For what it’s worth, I’m impressed your bank has Linux systemd support
In case you haven’t tried that yet, maybe you could run it in a systemd enabled distrobox container.
Thanks for this. I use Distrobox a lot and did not know this.
I’m guessing the service wants to edit something it can’t edit on Silverblue. So the software is simply incompatible with your OS (as stated in the documentation)
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’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.
update: Should’ve knocked harder, fedora 40 broke on my PC so I guess I’m switching to silverblue lmao
Been worth it to learn it and change my way of thinking.
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.
Bazzite has been smooth sailing about 80% of the time for me. The rest of the 20% were due to either plasma or runner crashing, requiring me to perform a hard reset using the power button. And then it magically atarted working again. I’ve also had my home folder become read-only on occasion. Very strange.
I loved it wile it works, but I couldn’t go on like that. It’ll be another year before I give it another shot.
feels like this post was sponsored by Anne Hathaway
