Oh, you!
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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.
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
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.
Only thing I haven't figured out, yet, is how to install the Private Internet Access client. It uses a .run
install script, and it fails when installing via rpm-ostree
(tries to write to /etc
) and doesn't like being installed in a Distrobox (needs systemd).
But yeah, I'm currently looking at some other options for my main system to drop Windows, and I'm always comparing to Fedora Atomics, now.
Yeah, third-party Linux VPN clients are pretty screwed on silverblue, and probably always will be. Especially since when installed in a container, they require being ran in a rootful container with selinux labeling disabled to enable direct access to /dev/net/tun, and as you’ve quickly found out, most of those weird bash based installers haven’t adapted. It’s best to use generic VPN configs through your DE atm.
I don’t use PIA, but /opt and /etc are both r/w in Silverblue/Kionite
why not use fedora's built-in openvpn client and just add the pia info? That should likely work. https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/linux-installing-openvpn-through-the-terminal
or built-in wireguard client? https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/alternative-setups-4/linux-manual-connection-scripts
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)
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!