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.

  • banazir@lemmy.ml
    60·
    2 years ago

    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!

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
      3·
      2 years ago

      that the thing, if it breaks, the roolback is there or simply rebase without merging /etc, so basically a factory reset

  • Lung@lemmy.world
    41·
    2 years ago

    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

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 years ago

      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).

  • fossphi@lemm.eeEnglish
    231·
    2 years ago

    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

    • Pfifel@lemmy.world
      14·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • hessnake@lemmy.world
        7·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • biribiri11@lemmy.ml
      9·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
      1·
      2 years ago

      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

  • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
    11·
    2 years ago

    Congratulations. You have completed Linux. Please prepare a usb installer for Haiku to move on to the next step of your jouney.

  • geoma@lemmy.ml
    9·
    2 years ago

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

    • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      2 years ago
      Toolbox create  
Toolbox enter

      Now you have a standard Fedora command line system that shares your home folder but otherwise has its own filesystem.
      There’s more options (like using other distro’s), but it’s really not complicated.

      To install CLI stuff that needs to access your host system’s root files, use rpm-ostree (but if you need a lot of that, use a non-immutable distro instead).

      I actually use neither anymore. My stuff I actually want to work with is in home and I have no need to tinker on this system, cause it just works.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    2 years ago

    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…

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 years 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.

  • pukeko@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    11 months later …

    NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp