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!
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!
I remember having a great experience with it, sorry yours hasn’t been great
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It’s an “immutable” Fedora, that is, the system comes as a read only image, kind of like how android works. Anything you do is “layered” on top of that image. This means you have to actually try to break it, because you can undo anything you did to break it by simply not booting with the extra layer(s).
You’re encouraged to install in userspace flatpaks instead of system-wide rpms where possible, as system-wide rpms means adding a layer on top if the image as it is.
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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.
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).
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
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
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.
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.
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)
For what it’s worth, I’m impressed your bank has Linux systemd support
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.
What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That’s sad…
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.
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
