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.
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 simplerebasecommand (e.g. swap between Silverblue and Kinoite, Kinoite and Bazzite).This is a definite “well um actually” moment, but technically immutability can be switched off at any time with
chattr, and “true” immutability will not be achieved until full image signing is commonplace. You can see the ideas laid out here: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2867It does let you do cool things though, like install nix: https://github.com/dnkmmr69420/nix-installer-scripts/blob/main/installer-scripts/silverblue-nix-installer.sh
don’t use that use this https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer
up-to-date, full support silverblue, don’t need to unlock the filesystem, full support for selinux too, they create the /etc/nix forlder and mount it on /nix
Yeah, I was just linking the other one because its usage of temporarily disabling immutability is more apparent. That one also disables immutability temporarily to install nix.