this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
430 points (94.2% liked)

Linux

54367 readers
669 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

You need to install a rootkit ASAP.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago

What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That's sad...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm in the same boat, Kinoite (or rather my own blue build of it) killed my distro-hopping. But fans of Arch might be interested in the upcoming immutable arch-based OS: BlendOS

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (4 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] 13 points 11 months ago

For what it's worth, I'm impressed your bank has Linux systemd support

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Is your browser installed as a Flatpak?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 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)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

All the signs of Lennart, but he's now left.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 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 11 months ago (1 children)

How does that work exactly?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 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] 1 points 11 months ago

They are both official Fedora Atomic Images. Universal Blue is another team that makes alternative Fedora Atomic Images like Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I wrote a thing about this earlier: Fedora has apparently been infected with an advertising department. Their website has a lot of branding and buzzwords and wanketeering and very few technical details. It never says the word Gnome anywhere. You just have to know "Workstation" and "Silverblue" mean Gnome.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It's fantastically boring

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

AAMOF, I install Fedora Kinoite (Like silverblue but KDE plasma) to people coming from windows, first GNU/Linux Experience.Practically unbreakable. does its work.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I remember having a great experience with it, sorry yours hasn't been great

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If installing the surface kernel (kind of necessary for my Surface Go 1) and installing a few appimages didn’t look so difficult, I guess I would already be on Silverblue.

I’m kind of the opposite of OP and just having nightmares about breaking my system 😅

That’s why I’m doing clonezilla backup but I think the custom kernel would be a problem if I reinstall on another non-Surface computer. Maybe I should just go back to the normal kernel before doing a backup..

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If the kernel is available in a COPR or another third party repo, you can just do a little swapping with rpm-ostree: https://github.com/openshift/os/blob/master/docs/faq.md#q-how-do-i-replace-the-current-kernel-with-kernel-rt-or-a-new-kernel-version-in-rhcos

Edit: Just in case this is the project you’re using, here’s specific install instructions for Fedora Silverblue: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup#fedora-silverblue

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Seems a bit too complicated for me, even if it probably ain’t.

But I’d probably use it if one day I break my Fedora workstation install.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You can make your own silverblue image with your custom kernel ;)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Weird. I use Bazzite which is off of Kinoite and the upgrade from 39 -> 40 was seamless.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›