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.
What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That’s sad…
Linux click bait Lv.999
You got me so good. Been using fedora for a few years now and I’ve been hesitant to hop to silverblue but now, after reading your issues with it I might just have to stay away. I can’t imagine a world of painless updates and rebasing smoothly. If I don’t have things to troubleshoot what else am I gonna do on my PC!
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
Congratulations. You have completed Linux. Please prepare a usb installer for Haiku to move on to the next step of your jouney.
You need to install a rootkit ASAP.
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
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).
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.
11 months later …
NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp
I’m in the same boat, Kinoite (or rather my own blue build of it) killed my distro-hopping. But fans of Arch might be interested in the upcoming immutable arch-based OS: BlendOS
Finally a real world manual.
Plug your USB in and spam that key while turning on your PC.
Arkane linux exist, it’s arch linux, and atomic using btrfs
Thanks! I had not heard about it.
It seems to only consider GNOME as the official DE and seem to not have the “blend” integrations of different distro.
Might not be for me but I appreciate the reply and it might help others.
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
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
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.
I guess you just have to use home manager on NixOS
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
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 really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It’s fantastically boring
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.
Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.
Then kill it. Distrohop again.
