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.
Linux click bait Lv.999
Congratulations. You have completed Linux. Please prepare a usb installer for Haiku to move on to the next step of your jouney.
I’ve had a similar experience with Guix.
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!
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
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’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).
Love the irony, but this is painting a little too good a picture
Every update is just… meh. Smooth, new, fresh system not affected by my stupid tweaking and breaking
Most times yes, but major updates usually cause some trouble, like from 39 to 40, you couldn’t do it without uninstalling the codecs for Firefox. Firefox that is installed by default as an RPM, because the Flatpak Firefox doesn’t yet have 100% compatibility with all the features that work with the RPM, so as a user you’re pretty much led to get yourself stuck in this hole, not too difficult to fix in the end, but still a pain to find out and fix.
Everything else is 100% true! And I think it will be always hard to beat as an implementation of immutability (second place only to NixOS imo), A/B partitioning doesn’t hold a candle to OSTree
you couldn’t do it without uninstalling the codecs for Firefox
what happened is rpm-fusion was lagging behind the official fedora repos, so, you could have just waited, or enabled the automatic update and forget about it
Is that so? From the issue I read there was no way around it because the two images are fundamentally incompatible once you layer that package, you had to remove the layered package, it seemed from the discussion that they might have “fixed” the base image at some point as a pull request was opened on Pagure. I waited a bit for it to go upstream, but nothing happened for a long time and just went thorugh with the manual intervention, and actually, now that I check it again, the maintainer siosm commented that they can’t accept the PR
oh, i never had that issue, only the rpm-fusion lag, never thought that the codecs needed a different approach
Weird. I use Bazzite which is off of Kinoite and the upgrade from 39 -> 40 was seamless.
Doesn’t Bazzite have the base image modified to have the codecs included already? I think that’s probably why you didn’t experience any disruption there
- Full hardware accelerated codec support for H264 decoding.
link: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/?tab=readme-ov-file#about--features
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!
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.
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.
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
