Nothing official - just personally curious. I have been using Fedora Silverblue on my personal laptop and have found that it largely has replaced my need for Fedora Workstation on that specific machine for casual tasks.
For those who fully understand Silverblue, know how to use toolbox, etc, what are your thoughts. Again, just a causal interest question.
0 voters
I’ve been using it since day 1 on my Framework 11th gen. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for most users though.
Interesting. Can you elaborate on any challenges someone coming from Ubuntu for example, might face? Once they’ve been dropped in front of the docs and get a lay of the land.
It’s an interesting concept and probably works fine, but for me it doesn’t really solve any problem and just makes some things harder. I’ll continue to use Workstation for now.
Great feedback everyone.
I guess if an Ubuntu user (or any other distro, or Windows/Mac for that matter) has read the docs, and is familiar with the concept, and is willing to try, there’s really nothing you can’t do on Silverblue.
I do think it has some quirks that might put some people off though. For example, the vscode flatpak has lots of issues, since it runs in the flatpak container, you need to jump through some hoops to get an extension like devcontainers working. Same with the KeePassXC flatpak (browser extension integration and Yubikey communication don’t always work).
Not to mention needing to restart for every little system update outside of Flatpak. Although I think you can --apply-live now? I don’t really use that flag (it was experimental when I was learning Silverblue, not sure if it still is) so I don’t really know if there’s complications there.
What I meant was that I wouldn’t recommend it to most users who want a distro where things work the way the work on most distros. And obviously, that’s the whole point of Silverblue, that it works differently. But you have to be willing to learn those differences and change your workflows sometimes.
edit: This isn’t to disparage Silverblue, I really like using it and I don’t ever want to stop, just explaining why I’d be hesitant to give a recommendation for it usually.
I keep Silverblue on my old Thinkpad T480s, but use Workstation as my daily driver. Simply Silverblue lacks the level of polish and ease of use to make it my daily driver at this time. There are simply too many nicks and cuts. I spend far too much time trying to get things to work 100% reliably instead of doing actual work. That being said it is definitely where Workstation is going to end up. I use most of the tooling available for Silverblue in Workstation just (toolbox, distrobox) not rpm-ostree, and I avoid problem flatpaks (Vscodium, Keepassxc). I already use btrfs snapshots to rollback my system if needed (not as rock solid as an immutable system due to the potential for bitrot, but close enough). Also when it comes to troubleshooting there is not an additional layer of abstraction to deal with.
So Workstation for me, but I would actually recommend Silverblue for a lot of users, particularly new users looking for a stable linux experience. Also I can see this being ideal in Enterprise settings for your typical office worker box.
TLDR: Silverblue currently lacks all the tooling necessary to make it a seamless replacement for Workstation. Once this happens it will be ready for prime time. Currently takes too much lift to get it there from a base install. i.e. minutes on Workstation to hours on Silveblue with recurring headaches.
Excellent feedback. This is very helpful - appreciate everyone who participated!
@Matt_Hartley have you tried Vanilla OS? Also doing the immutable thing, very new but looks like an interesting project https://vanillaos.org/
My opinion on Fedora Immutable Desktop Distros based on flatpak, rpm-ostree, podman, and toolbox such as Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sericea, and Fedora Onyx, is that they are easier to use for Linux noobs.
Flatpaks make software installation on Linux painless, my friend and I both bought 11th-gen Frameworks in November last year and we both installed Fedora Silverblue as first-time Linux users, basically only two packages had to be layered, the proprietary intel-media-driver for hardware video acceleration from rpm-fusion and tlp for power savings from the official Fedora repositories.
Also, all kernel parameters can be changed in a single place with sudo rpm-ostree kargs (actually I am not sure if most other distros have different places to change kernel parameters), permission management for Flatpak software using Flatseal is also convenient.
I know that these features either already exist or can be installed on many other distros, but being forced to use Flatpak (unless a toolbox container is more convenient as in the case of VScode already mentioned by others in the thread) causes less issues in the long-term (and when there are issues, Flatseal can be used for custom environment variables or for providing access to specific files), the overrides are conveniently in the same place, it’s quite close to a “just works” experience in my opinion.
I do wish however that toolbox were replaced with distrobox, since distrobox is as convenient yet simply more powerful since it supports containers of many more distros than toolbox. (Not that Linux noobs would regularly or even ever use these containers anyway)
I’m not someone who “fully understand[s] Silverblue,” so I didn’t vote, but I keep reading about it out of curiosity because I’ve seen some people describe it as the way of the future.
This is my big concern. My brief experiences with Flatpaks for VS Code (getting an extension to work) and Teams (getting screen / window sharing to work) were not positive. I do academic / scientific work where I’m building things from source and installing a lot of dependencies through the package manager(s), and it seems like a Flatpak-oriented OS isn’t meant to go that far off the rails.
Appreciate everyone’s feedback, got what I wanted. Again, this was me simply looking down the rabbit hole for the distant future - this helps. Thank you