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.
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!
I really love Fedora Kinoite. Like you said, everything just works. It’s fantastically boring
Welcome to the very reason I’ll never ever try Silveblue 😄
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.
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.
I’m trying to make a TPM chip work out of curiosity and it has been frustrating. Does that help?
That helps, yes. Thank you.
feels like this post was sponsored by Anne Hathaway
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.
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.
I rebase quite often, its the better distrohopping.
Have a look at Fedora Discuss, interesting things there.
I don’t fully understand how silverblue and kinoite are different, but I feel this way with base Fedora KDE. I’ve never broken it even a little bit when that used to be common with Ubuntu based distros for whatever reason.
I’ve been considering it for a while but my main setup (knock on wood) has been rock solid with traditional fedora. If I ever end up switching distros silverblue is probably going to be it.
update: Should’ve knocked harder, fedora 40 broke on my PC so I guess I’m switching to silverblue lmao
Wow I was so confused while reading this haha, got me good there! Happy to hear its working as expected :P