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Fedora Silverblue is the most frustrating distro so far (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 98 points 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 80 points 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!

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[-] lung@lemmy.world 53 points 5 months 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 8 points 5 months 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).

[-] kronarbob@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago

What an horror ! What are you gonna do ? Use your working system ? That's sad...

[-] mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 5 months ago

Linux click bait Lv.999

[-] fossphi@lemm.ee 26 points 5 months 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 18 points 5 months 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 points 5 months 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.

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[-] biribiri11@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 months 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 points 5 months 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.

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[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 26 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] gianni@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 months ago

https://stopthemingmy.app/

[-] kspatlas@lemm.ee 14 points 5 months ago

Aren't a lot of these issues due to gtk not being as theme friendly as Qt?

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[-] iegod@lemm.ee 9 points 5 months ago

Screw that.

[-] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 9 points 5 months ago

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).

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[-] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 19 points 5 months ago

I rebase quite often, its the better distrohopping.

Have a look at Fedora Discuss, interesting things there.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/119216

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[-] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 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

[-] Unreliable@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 months ago

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

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[-] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 16 points 5 months ago

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

[-] sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today 15 points 5 months ago

I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It's fantastically boring

[-] geoma@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months 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.

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[-] user91@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

Agreed. Been super boring and stable on Aurora.

[-] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 13 points 5 months ago

Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.

Then kill it. Distrohop again.

[-] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] warmaster@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

You need to install a rootkit ASAP.

[-] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 11 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] yak@feddit.it 10 points 5 months ago

Welcome to the very reason I'll never ever try Silveblue 😄

[-] pukeko@lemm.ee 10 points 5 months ago

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

[-] Sunny@slrpnk.net 9 points 5 months ago

Wow I was so confused while reading this haha, got me good there! Happy to hear its working as expected :P

[-] yak@feddit.it 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 9 points 5 months ago

feels like this post was sponsored by Anne Hathaway

[-] Lem453@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 months ago

And good resources on how to learn to use Toolbox properly?

[-] KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months 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.

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[-] BaumGeist@lemmy.ml 8 points 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

[+] helenslunch@feddit.nl 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

[deleted]

[-] dan@upvote.au 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's an immutable/atomic version of Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.

I've never tried it though!

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[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 6 points 5 months ago

It's immutable (aka. atomic), which means the system files cannot be changed, even by root. System updates come as complete system snapshots of the core filesystem, and everything else exists in containers or filesystem overlays (user directory is still writeable). Containers and the user's home directory are unaffected by the updates, so the update process is typically much safer overall.

If an update does break something, you can easily do rpm-ostree rollback, and everything will be working again. On top of that, you can swap between versions with a simple rebase command (e.g. swap between Silverblue and Kinoite, Kinoite and Bazzite).

[-] biribiri11@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 months ago

It’s immutable (aka. atomic), which means the system files cannot be changed, even by root.

This is a definite “well um actually” moment, but technically immutability can be switched off at any time with chattr, and “true” immutability will not be achieved until full image signing is commonplace. You can see the ideas laid out here: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2867

It does let you do cool things though, like install nix: https://github.com/dnkmmr69420/nix-installer-scripts/blob/main/installer-scripts/silverblue-nix-installer.sh

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[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

It's an "immutable" Fedora, that is, the system comes as a read only image, kind of like how android works. Anything you do is "layered" on top of that image. This means you have to actually try to break it, because you can undo anything you did to break it by simply not booting with the extra layer(s).

You're encouraged to install in userspace flatpaks instead of system-wide rpms where possible, as system-wide rpms means adding a layer on top if the image as it is.

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[-] MajorSauce@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 months ago

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

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[-] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 6 points 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..

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[-] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 6 points 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.

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[-] olafurp@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months 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.

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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024

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