this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] olafurp 5 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How does that work exactly?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

isn't the opposite?, fedora started ostree, ublue came after

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] ozymandias117 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t use PIA, but /opt and /etc are both r/w in Silverblue/Kionite

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

you can unlock your /usr with rpm-ostree usroverlay

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

you can unlock the file system, don't remember how tho

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)
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[–] flyhunter 3 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Is your browser installed as a Flatpak?

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[–] KISSmyOSFeddit 2 points 5 months ago

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)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Can you still install extensions in GNOME? I hate the defaults

[–] KISSmyOSFeddit 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yes but only from Gnome directly with an app called extensions manager. You can't install them from the Fedora repo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago
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