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.

  • secret300@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    5 months ago

    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!

  • banazir@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months 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
      0·
      5 months ago

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

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      What does rebasing mean in this context? I try to google it, but all I get is git rebase.

      Any articles about it that are worth reading? Or if you can explain, that would be neat. Thanks!

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        It’s a command provided by the OS to distrotop between ublue distros. You can basically hop between silverblue, Kionite and Bazzite with a single command.

          • Vilian@lemmy.ca
            0·
            5 months ago

            ostree based distros*, the default fedora don’t use ostree so you can’t rebase, bazzite is not fedora but they also use ostree, so you rebase there

            • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
              0·
              5 months ago

              I have so much to learn. Last time I was tracking distros and having fun with distro hopping was with Slackware 7, I think.

              What is ostree? What is bazzite? Time to google stuff.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        0·
        5 months ago

        Its the same :D

        Rebasing refers to an OSTree remote which is like a git repo, but with binaries and producing bootable systems. There are some differences there.

        The idea is: there is a remote that has the exact wanted configuration, your system mirrors it. All the package manager does is similar to git pull.

        If you rebase, you switch the upstream remote, and your system gets the diffs, downloads them.

        The cool thing is, that these updates are atomic, so you stay on the current system and the rebased one is only set as the system you boot in after a reboot. You can still sudo ostree admin pin 0 before rebasing, and your current system will be saved forever to switch back to.

        Note that /etc is writable so you might still accumulate duplicate or redundant configs.

        gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig/-/issues

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months 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.

    • root@aussie.zoneEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      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.

  • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Love the irony, but this is painting a little too good a picture

    Every update is just… meh. Smooth, new, fresh system not affected by my stupid tweaking and breaking

    Most times yes, but major updates usually cause some trouble, like from 39 to 40, you couldn’t do it without uninstalling the codecs for Firefox. Firefox that is installed by default as an RPM, because the Flatpak Firefox doesn’t yet have 100% compatibility with all the features that work with the RPM, so as a user you’re pretty much led to get yourself stuck in this hole, not too difficult to fix in the end, but still a pain to find out and fix.

    Everything else is 100% true! And I think it will be always hard to beat as an implementation of immutability (second place only to NixOS imo), A/B partitioning doesn’t hold a candle to OSTree

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
      0·
      5 months ago

      you couldn’t do it without uninstalling the codecs for Firefox

      what happened is rpm-fusion was lagging behind the official fedora repos, so, you could have just waited, or enabled the automatic update and forget about it

      • QuazarOmega@lemy.lolEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Is that so? From the issue I read there was no way around it because the two images are fundamentally incompatible once you layer that package, you had to remove the layered package, it seemed from the discussion that they might have “fixed” the base image at some point as a pull request was opened on Pagure. I waited a bit for it to go upstream, but nothing happened for a long time and just went thorugh with the manual intervention, and actually, now that I check it again, the maintainer siosm commented that they can’t accept the PR

        • Vilian@lemmy.ca
          0·
          5 months ago

          oh, i never had that issue, only the rpm-fusion lag, never thought that the codecs needed a different approach

    • Unreliable@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 months ago

      Weird. I use Bazzite which is off of Kinoite and the upgrade from 39 -> 40 was seamless.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    5 months 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…

  • pukeko@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    11 months later …

    NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    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