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.
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.
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.
Depends what you break. Sure kernels are easy to fix like you mention, but what if you bork your display manager?
Can’t you run timeshift from a live usb? Never tried, but i believe its possible. Obviously more time consuming and bothersome, but possible.
I actually don’t know whether timeshift can just run easily from a live USB, but I don’t see why not.
But of course that also requires you to have installed and set up timeshift before (which is obviously a good idea)
It’s quite a different deal when the whole operating system it built around a timeshift-like concept.
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
Welcome to the very reason I’ll never ever try Silveblue 😄
But well, if that helps, look at the bright side: while it’s true that it’ll almost never give you problems, I think it’s true that the time the problems will happen, they will be pretty hard to solve, so it might break very bad. That’s great, isn’t it?
Don’t tell me that this thing just cannot breaks. If that was even possible, that’d be tremendously evil.
bro, trust me i tried to break it, i booted without kernel parameters, my system didn’t even had a root partition, shit was craze, and it didn’t have a /home, rolled back just fine
-rebase from different fedora versions, i couldn’t even login because of kernel versions(yeah even trying to login as root didn’t work)
but, i read a history that happened a bug in ostree, in the early days, and the devs needed to ask the users to fix it manually, but was when in the start of silverblue
That really sucks, sorry to hear that man. It seems honestly pretty bad and I really have to stay away from this distro.
Only RedHat could have conceived something this evil. Of course is RedHat, who else could it have been?
But…!
but, i read a history that happened a bug in ostree, in the early days, and the devs needed to ask the users to fix it manually, but was when in the start of silverblue
This. This is really giving me hope. It kind of confirms what I was saying too. You see? It almost never breaks. But when it breaks, oh man! It breaks very hard indeed.
Never give up mate, that thing is gonna break somehow, sooner or later. It has to.
found it lol, apparently was a grub issue not ostree one, the last thing standing between a full atomic system, grub lol
Bro how about this? Sounds pretty interesting to me
I’m trying to make a TPM chip work out of curiosity and it has been frustrating. Does that help?
That helps, yes. Thank you.
Only thing I haven’t figured out, yet, is how to install the Private Internet Access client. It uses a
.runinstall script, and it fails when installing viarpm-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.
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.
why not use fedora’s built-in openvpn client and just add the pia info? That should likely work. https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/linux-installing-openvpn-through-the-terminal
or built-in wireguard client? https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/alternative-setups-4/linux-manual-connection-scripts
I do use OVPN. PIA didn’t have a standalone WG config apart from their client when I last checked, so I’ll have to look at that second article and see if it’s workable, because the other issue is ease of use (I’m not the only one using it, you see).
Thanks for the info, though! Might solve my last hangup.
Any program with an install script makes assumptions about your system, if it doesn’t work it just isn’t compatible.
Either modify the script, package the software for your distro or find out if someone else has done it.
My first instinct would be to look if it’s in the AUR and install it inside an Arch Toolbox.you can unlock the file system, don’t remember how tho
Wouldn’t help, because any changes I make would be wiped out on the next update (plus it kind of defeats the purpose of an immutable system). I don’t want to go down that road, primarily because the maintenance needs to be as easy as clicking a button (I’m not the only user, so ease of use is necessary).
The better option would be to have it live in the filesystem overlay, but I can’t seem to get that to work. It’s possible that it could be a flatpak, as ProtonVPN has their client as a flatpak, but PIA doesn’t seem all that interested in throwing any bones to Linux users.
I don’t use PIA, but /opt and /etc are both r/w in Silverblue/Kionite
I’ll have to give that a try, then. Doesn’t work on Bazzite.
you can unlock your /usr with rpm-ostree usroverlay
Oh, hmm. I’ll have to look at that. I didn’t know you could unlock the overlay for specific folders
feels like this post was sponsored by Anne Hathaway
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.
Thank you. I feel like I’ve found a new way to respect developers that I hadn’t considered before.
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.
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.
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’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
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
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.
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
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.
I guess you just have to use home manager on NixOS
Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.
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.
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.
I loved it wile it works, but I couldn’t go on like that. It’ll be another year before I give it another shot.
After beginning to wrap my head around atomic immutable OSes, I can’t believe they’re not the standard for most servers. i can’t believe Debian doesn’t have an official atomic and immutable version yet, seems exactly like the kind of stability they aim for
I’ve had a similar experience with Guix.
I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It’s fantastically boring
I remember having a great experience with it, sorry yours hasn’t been great
