this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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OCI images that you can turn into a full-fledged developer workstation shipping Devbox, Nix, Homebrew, devcontainers and DevPod with one command. Pretty swanky!

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[–] sfcl33t 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm still having a hard time grasping this, probably because I don't understand OCI images. How would this be different than say using fedora with docker to spin up containers with stuff I need?

[–] worldofgeese 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hmm, well Fedora on its own (so no Silverblue) is very much your classic way of shipping a distro. That tends to mean that, over time, "cruft" accumulates as you upgrade your system, uninstall/reinstall packages, etc. They leave bits of themselves behind that can cause unwanted behavior.

Fedora Silverblue, that Bluefin is based on, treats the entire system layer as "immutable". Basically, it ensures consistency so that upgrades and package upgrades don't leave the system in an inconsistent state.

What Bluefin adds on top of this is a set of opinionated, pre-configured layers suited for getting particular groups of tasks done. Those layers are also immutable and tested as a whole, which makes shipping those layers at velocity easy (faster upgrades, less wonky behavior on upgrade) and easy to swap between, so you can go from gaming to developer mode without worrying about an accumulation of cruft.

Is that helpful at all? There's also this announcement blog post, which I found very helpful in understanding the value proposition.

[–] sfcl33t 13 points 1 year ago

Yes!! Super helpful. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty much the same however it would be like you're working inside a docker container to cover and build your container images.

In this setup your entire os is a container also. It's just another layer. This is the same way the Steam Deck distributes updates and many of us believe to be the future for the next wave of Linux users.