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.
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…
If the kernel is available in a COPR or another third party repo, you can just do a little swapping with rpm-ostree: https://github.com/openshift/os/blob/master/docs/faq.md#q-how-do-i-replace-the-current-kernel-with-kernel-rt-or-a-new-kernel-version-in-rhcos
Edit: Just in case this is the project you’re using, here’s specific install instructions for Fedora Silverblue: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installation-and-Setup#fedora-silverblue
Seems a bit too complicated for me, even if it probably ain’t.
But I’d probably use it if one day I break my Fedora workstation install.
Oh it’s definitely over-complicated, and contrary to what others say here, Silverblue can definitely have some very difficult to troubleshoot problems (especially when using things outside the direct Fedora ecosystem), which are greatly worsened by rpm-ostree taking 15 years to do anything despite sharing code with the supposedly lighting-quick dnf5. For servers, rpm-ostree is great (it’s in all of RH k8s offerings, see RHCOS), but on desktops, there’s definitely a good reason why RH has to apparent offering and Fedora calls theirs “emerging”. Still miles better than having an unbootable system after updating.
oh, the 15 years to do anything is true, i know when my system is updating in the background just from the sound of my laptop fan lol, but they do a 3-way merge using the remote image, your overlays and your /etc, so it’s a intensive process i guess
You can make your own silverblue image with your custom kernel ;)