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.

    • dan@upvote.au
      14·
      6 months ago

      It’s an immutable/atomic version of Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

      My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.

      I’ve never tried it though!

    • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      It’s an “immutable” Fedora, that is, the system comes as a read only image, kind of like how android works. Anything you do is “layered” on top of that image. This means you have to actually try to break it, because you can undo anything you did to break it by simply not booting with the extra layer(s).

      You’re encouraged to install in userspace flatpaks instead of system-wide rpms where possible, as system-wide rpms means adding a layer on top if the image as it is.

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
      6·
      6 months ago

      It’s immutable (aka. atomic), which means the system files cannot be changed, even by root. System updates come as complete system snapshots of the core filesystem, and everything else exists in containers or filesystem overlays (user directory is still writeable). Containers and the user’s home directory are unaffected by the updates, so the update process is typically much safer overall.

      If an update does break something, you can easily do rpm-ostree rollback, and everything will be working again. On top of that, you can swap between versions with a simple rebase command (e.g. swap between Silverblue and Kinoite, Kinoite and Bazzite).