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.
You got me so good. Been using fedora for a few years now and I’ve been hesitant to hop to silverblue but now, after reading your issues with it I might just have to stay away. I can’t imagine a world of painless updates and rebasing smoothly. If I don’t have things to troubleshoot what else am I gonna do on my PC!
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!
that the thing, if it breaks, the roolback is there or simply rebase without merging /etc, so basically a factory reset
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).
What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That’s sad…
Linux click bait Lv.999
I’m a bit behind on these immutable distros and have a small question. People keep saying you can just switch to another image if you want to switch desktop environments. But how does this solve the problem of the config files of the various DEs (GTK rc files or other theme stuff) messing with each other in the home directory? Because this was always a pain in the ass in normal distros
Switching DEs is not recommended by devs so I assume the configs are still conflicting. Home dir doesn’t get affected by an image rebase most likely.
I’ve switched between Plasma, Cosmic, Sway, and Hyprland without any conflicts. For the Plasma 5->6 transition it did change my config in a way that broke Plasma 5 when I rolled back, so problems are possible.
Basically your mileage may vary.
it’s in the official documentation lol
But how does this solve the problem of the config files of the various DEs (GTK rc files or other theme stuff) messing with each other in the home directory?
It does not. Your dotfiles will be a bit wrecked when you rebase. See: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/why-is-rebasing-between-desktop-environments-bad/690/4 It’ll also cause random issues like: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/flatpak-apps-crashing-after-rebasing-from-silverblue-to-kinoite/83623/2
It’s mostly plasma fighting gnome, though. I haven’t seen any conflicts with say, sway.
Your files are a mutable part, they stick around for rebase and rollback. (I believe /etc also.) If it’s only files in a home directory you could try a different DE by making a new user. But yeah I don’t think it has a built-in solution for something like that.
yeah, home directory is mutable, but you can simply create another user, the /etc is also mutable(the system do a diff of it every update) but you can see every file that changed there(compared with the remote image) using ostree, or create another deploy where you discart your /etc, so, if you discart your /etc, and create another user, you have fresh install, without needing to reinstall using a pendrive etc
I guess you just have to use home manager on NixOS
Is this a First Linux-World Problem? :D
To me, I like how clean and coherent GNOME looks like, but what I don’t like about it, is how hostile it is in regarding of themeing/coloring.
Aren’t a lot of these issues due to gtk not being as theme friendly as Qt?
It is my understanding that a lot of thought and care is put into the design language and appearance of applications and frameworks. However the same level of consideration is not usually afforded to skins and themes, which are often released an never updated again. This can cause usability issues and sometimes even breakages. Of course, people are free to do as they please with their computers.
Yeah I get the rational, and that DEs shouldn’t theme them apps but I want to have some sort of customization (not just an accent color).
Screw that.
Yeah. My guess is that for every meticulously hand crafted ui, there’s 10 that just go with the default. If a user wants an icon pack where🤘means home, they’ll be perfectly fine with navigating your application.
Developers can always include an option to disable styling if that would severely break the ui. But personally, I’d rather use a application that looks roughly like every other one in the system, than one that’s so specifically designed that it doesn’t.
Thank you. I feel like I’ve found a new way to respect developers that I hadn’t considered before.
I don’t support that some want to push their own theme. Just use the provided theme. You may create your own custom theme but that should be able to be used everywhere. App icons can be part of a theme.
Have you tried Gradience?
Yeah I tried it, but sadly it didn’t really worked well in for example Geary.
I rebase quite often, its the better distrohopping.
Have a look at Fedora Discuss, interesting things there.
What does rebasing mean in this context? I try to google it, but all I get is git rebase.
Any articles about it that are worth reading? Or if you can explain, that would be neat. Thanks!
It’s a command provided by the OS to distrotop between ublue distros. You can basically hop between silverblue, Kionite and Bazzite with a single command.
So, this is only available for Fedora users?
ostree based distros*, the default fedora don’t use ostree so you can’t rebase, bazzite is not fedora but they also use ostree, so you rebase there
I have so much to learn. Last time I was tracking distros and having fun with distro hopping was with Slackware 7, I think.
What is ostree? What is bazzite? Time to google stuff.
Its the same :D
Rebasing refers to an OSTree remote which is like a git repo, but with binaries and producing bootable systems. There are some differences there.
The idea is: there is a remote that has the exact wanted configuration, your system mirrors it. All the package manager does is similar to
git pull.If you rebase, you switch the upstream remote, and your system gets the diffs, downloads them.
The cool thing is, that these updates are atomic, so you stay on the current system and the rebased one is only set as the system you boot in after a reboot. You can still
sudo ostree admin pin 0before rebasing, and your current system will be saved forever to switch back to.Note that /etc is writable so you might still accumulate duplicate or redundant configs.
Thanks!
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
Weird. I use Bazzite which is off of Kinoite and the upgrade from 39 -> 40 was seamless.
Doesn’t Bazzite have the base image modified to have the codecs included already? I think that’s probably why you didn’t experience any disruption there
- Full hardware accelerated codec support for H264 decoding.
link: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/?tab=readme-ov-file#about--features
you couldn’t do it without uninstalling the codecs for Firefox
what happened is rpm-fusion was lagging behind the official fedora repos, so, you could have just waited, or enabled the automatic update and forget about it
Is that so? From the issue I read there was no way around it because the two images are fundamentally incompatible once you layer that package, you had to remove the layered package, it seemed from the discussion that they might have “fixed” the base image at some point as a pull request was opened on Pagure. I waited a bit for it to go upstream, but nothing happened for a long time and just went thorugh with the manual intervention, and actually, now that I check it again, the maintainer siosm commented that they can’t accept the PR
oh, i never had that issue, only the rpm-fusion lag, never thought that the codecs needed a different approach
Congratulations. You have completed Linux. Please prepare a usb installer for Haiku to move on to the next step of your jouney.
I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It’s fantastically boring
AAMOF, I install Fedora Kinoite (Like silverblue but KDE plasma) to people coming from windows, first GNU/Linux Experience.Practically unbreakable. does its work.
As A Matter Of Fact, I had to google that because I’ve never seen anyone use that abbreviation.
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.
Then kill it. Distrohop again.
I’m still getting things set for Silverblue to be my baremetal hypervisor distro on my laptop. And by that, I mean giving up on Incus, setting up libvirt, and… everything is working like it should. I wasn’t expecting that. Now, I’ve got to find something else to do with my time.
What’d you dislike about Incus that libvirt does easier? I’m on a similar trajectory as you. I have Incus on Debian but I am transitioning to IoT for that machine. I kinda like Incus. I want to attach USB devices to a couple of my containers, it was a learning curve but eventually worked out alright.
For me, I think it’s just not ready for non-Debian distros yet. The docs and packages just aren’t up to parity. I like a lot about Incus and its general direction but libvirt and virt-manager are fully functional at the moment. Passing through devices with virt-manager is dead easy.
