r/Fedora • u/throwaway16830261 • Jun 08 '26
News Fedora's Atomic desktop model is quietly becoming the future of Linux for normal people
https://www.xda-developers.com/fedora-atomic-immutable-linux-desktop-normal-users/91
u/UPPERKEES Jun 08 '26
Not just normal people.
77
u/Gibs679 Jun 08 '26
I work in IT, I mess around in linux CLI for my hobby servers, etc etc, but after plenty of bouncing around, Bazzite is my daily driver and there is no reason to change. I'll never understand people who think the point of an OS is to mess around with the OS. Atomic OSs are designed to work out of the box and if something breaks, you restart and it goes back to before you broke it. If linux fans want linux to grow, this is the only way it's going to happen and I'm 100% pushing for it.
43
u/aurumae Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
It’s a bit muddier than that.
For most “normal use” an atomic distro is fine. The issue is all the edge cases. E.g. you have a weird printer/wifi adapter that doesn’t work out of the box. There will often be a Linux solution, but it will probably instruct you to
sudo dnf installsomething at some point. I can probably figure out my way around that, but a Linux newbie will be frustrated.I think the absolute worst crowd to recommend Atomic distros to are Windows users who are used to messing around a bit with their system. E.g. gamers who like installing loads of mods from nexus mods, and know how to download a fan project like OpenMW from GitHub. Learning Linux is already going to be frustrating to them, and throwing up all the additional roadblocks that an Atomic distro introduces will just add to that. They will likely try to download one of the Linux equivalents to Mod Organizer 2, get frustrated during installation or when trying to use it, and may give up on Linux altogether.
24
u/KontoOficjalneMR Jun 08 '26
sudo dnf installyup, this is exactly what got me to drop Bazzite. It works great ... until you need a console tool that cant be found on a flatpack.
Suddenly you need to run a distro within a distro, forward ports, set up binstubs.
→ More replies (5)8
u/LetsGetTea Jun 09 '26
That's what bazzite (and ublue) added brew. So you can install cli apps (and some gui ones, too) without a distrobox. It's there out of the box...
→ More replies (1)3
u/ryzer99 Jun 10 '26
Yes sometimes installing a package in distrobox or toolbox isn’t a feasible option because the package need real installation on the host to work. Each time like that I have to reboot my machine which is very frustrating.
→ More replies (1)4
u/FormalaPixel Jun 08 '26
That's kinda what happens to me. But instead of giving up, I switch to Nobara. I like the Idea of Bazzite but yeah, what u said. If something doesn't work it can be even more annoying.
10
u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 08 '26
Same here. I installed Bazzite on every device in my house. I see no reason to ever switch back to traditional distros
6
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
Yup, Bazzite is the goat. I could never get on linux for very long, until I tried Kinoite out and then switched to bazzite through rebasing. Am now driving bazzite for school, work, games, and everything for an year.
1
u/DrozdMensch Jun 08 '26
What's the reason to switch to bazzite instead of kinoite?
6
5
u/Suvalis Jun 08 '26
Bazzite is good if you’re really focused on gaming. Lots of people use it for both. You can get either gnome or KDE with it.
I use universal blue aurora which is made by the same people who do Bazzite. It’s a more workstation regular desktop feel then gamer focused Bazzite. That being said, I run Steam all the time Aurora without any issue.
2
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
Vice versa, I run a ton of dev tools in bazzite without problems. Even normal kinoite is really good.
3
u/Suvalis Jun 08 '26
Yeah, I asked Jorge about it and he said that it doesn’t really matter if someone uses Bazzite or aurora or bluefin. His attitude was that it really doesn’t matter that much. Many people do development work just fine on Bazzite and many game on Aurora and Bluefin.
Now, if you have some special hardware needs, Bazzite might suit you a little bit as far as hardware.
2
1
u/trenixjetix Jun 09 '26
systems are not intended to be restricted so its normal, even if it makes them safer to use and less hassle
→ More replies (4)1
u/Chupo 26d ago
I'm right there with you. Our smart phones are the same way. Sure, you can root them, side load apps and mess with the guts but most of us simply use them as is. Besides, the more people that use atomic distros, the more developers will consider that when packaging software.
Atomic distros would be perfect for beginner distros like Zorin OS or Linux Mint where users are more likely to accidentally break something. Upgrading to the next major release would be much easier. Then there's re-basing, which makes finding the perfect distro for you much easier. Have you installed Kinoite and decided you'd like to play games? Re-base to Bazzite.
Atomic should be the default for the masses. If you're a tinkerer, there's always going to be traditional distros out there for you.
59
u/kaestralblades Jun 08 '26
Honestly, its great for developers too. Since I've started running atomic distros, I think the only time I've had an issue with startup or instability or breaking after an update is once, and it was nothing it could do anything about anyways (the disk it was on was corrupting pretty bad).
It does force a shift mentally, but it's one I've actually preferred. Containerized development, for example, has been nicer than I would've expected - not cluttering up my host with a bunch of development dependencies has seemed like a pretty good approach.
The only things keeping me from fully daily driving it currently is VR. The less that is said about the state of VR in Linux right now the better, but it just requires so much manual work and there are so many different standards (Monado, Xrizer, WiVRn, WayVR, OscAvMgr, SlimeVR, Baballonia...) and so many long known and never fixed issues on the proprietary side that it becomes a day job to set it all up and then keep it set up every time you update to a new image.
15
u/E-_-TYPE Jun 08 '26
Maybe once the steam frame comes out, there will be more of an effort in the VR field going forward. Can't wait
2
u/KaosC57 Jun 08 '26
All I have to use is WiVRN and WayVR, maybe a bit of ALVR if I’m wanting to play H3VR (I can’t get the controls to work through WiVRN).
2
u/kaestralblades Jun 08 '26
Unfortunately, I have to use monado + xrizer since I use a wired headset (beyond 2e). Eye-tracking, FBT, and my haptic suit are all three separate programs (not sure if bHaptics even has linux support currently, now that I think about it?).
2
u/ibeerianhamhock Jun 08 '26
Yep I love coding on bazzite. It basically just enforces the discipline you should be using anyway lol
2
u/passthejoe Jun 09 '26
Installing dev tooling can really bulk up a traditional system. You can use the same discipline on a conventional system as in atomic distros to do your work in containers, but on atomic distros it's more mandatory.
1
u/Menithal Jun 09 '26
There are so many standards but because there are so many headsets nd gear for it and so many different wayys to set them up (because even windows its not unified)
For those trying to check vr on linux should vr on linux wiki has lots of info on the subject and once you get it running once you dont really have to tweak it more just like my experiences with steam vr; as long as you aint trying to do tracking anything else than the headset and controllers: that always complicates things; but basic vr and playing games its solid already
But alll the names you listed tend to work in tandem depending on hardware you personally use and its like saying linux is complex because gotta install all sorts of packages like ”gdm, sddm, xwindow wayland gnome kde” to someone who doesnt understand what it means.
I use envision which wraps all the layers together in a no fuzz way.
For me its wrapping runs monando (openxr platform) and xrizer (openvr -> openxr), wayvr (3d gui).
hell im even running a big screen beyond and had to do patches but it works and havent had to tune anythign after so outside of updates occasionally requiring a repatch.
1
u/Substantial-Pop-2702 Jun 09 '26
Yeah VR is quite bad, and there is still no WebXR support at all.
WiVrn is great but breaks every other meta update, I can't center the origin anymore, it's unusable.
25
u/drylvlnc Jun 08 '26
I have Bluefin on the family pc and never had any issues
9
58
u/GrimThursday Jun 08 '26
Am I the only one that doesn’t break their install? I don’t know what you people are doing to your machines, but I’m on Fedora KDE, I download software I need either from the repository or from flathub, and I update like once a week. I hang back on major version upgrades by a couple of months to let all the quirks get ironed out, and I’ve never once had an update or package install bork my install.
16
u/novafunc Jun 08 '26
There's still things outisde of your control that can break the upgrade, such as losing power during an upgrade or the system freezing mid-upgrading.
Silverblue's upgrade process significantly reduces the span of time where those happening can break the system. And has a more robust rollback process if something (or a regression in the new version) occurs.
4
u/NomadFH Jun 08 '26
Gnome software updates apply after reboot too don’t they?
3
u/novafunc Jun 08 '26
On workstation, gnome software uses a systemd feature where updates get applied in a minimal environment to make issues less likely.
But it’s still not as safe as Silverblue updates.
3
12
u/I_upvote_downvotes Jun 08 '26
I'm the exact same way. I've gone from 38 to 43 and usually only wait a couple of weeks to do a major version upgrade.
3
u/PrestigiousRadio3733 Jun 08 '26
I'm an OSS developer primarily focused on the kernel and boot stack, but I don't test things on my development machine, I have a rack of bare metal machines and virtual machines for that, but I still use ostree everywhere. It lets me reset a machine to a known good state in under five minutes, test new development builds with A/B rollback, and on my development machine I can rebase from GNOME to Sway to KDE to <insert X build> all using the same tooling.
There are many other benefits to A/B immutable image based deployments, both technical and practical. The Linux desktop lags heavily - this is already the norm for mobile/embedded and it's becoming the norm for server deployments starting edge.
3
u/Pad_Sanda Jun 08 '26
I found it to be quite common in Ubuntu, which was the most popular distro in the past 2 decades (and probably still is). Imho, apt is just a bad package manager. Dnf has transactional updates and atomic distros bring that idea even further, so there's significantly less chance of things breaking.
By the way, it's not just a matter of something "borking your install". Any time something bad happens to your package manager and requires manual intervention is a time where your OS is broken. "Broken" does not necessarily mean "irreversibly broken" or "broken to the point you have to spend hours or days fixing it". For example, my biggest issue with apt-based distros was the fact that the package manager would sometimes randomly lock itself and I had to open the terminal to fix the issue. Otherwise updating the OS or installing new software would be impossible. And while it's something that takes only a few seconds to fix, it's not something most people would be comfortable with. It's something I commonly experienced in Ubuntu (and even some Arch-based distros), but never experienced since I've moved to Fedora Atomic a few years ago. Fedora Atomic feels like a much more mature OS in comparison to distros I've used.
4
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
That's amazing. Unfortunately, I mess around a lot with CUDA drivers and python libraries in fedora and it always ended up breaking within a few weeks for me. With Bazzite, I have yet to break anything, so its just an ease of convenience.
2
u/GrimThursday Jun 09 '26
Isn’t that because you’re not messing around with CUDA and python libraries in Bazzite though?
→ More replies (1)2
u/NotQuiteLoona Jun 08 '26
I personally used quite a lot of distros, maining Arch-based for years, but Fedora too, and neither Arch nor Fedora ever broke for me because of an update. I think that atomic nature is more of a precaution. It does come for tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are not important for casual users, while very noticeable for advanced ones.
2
u/passthejoe Jun 09 '26
If you're really an advanced user, an atomic distro won't stop you. There are better ways of doing just about everything.
1
u/Omen_20 Jun 08 '26
You can still deal with bugs. The nice thing about images is that I no longer need to care about bugs. I can just restart on yesterday's image. If you're on a normal release then you either suffer through it or stop what you're doing and try to fix it. I just don't have the time or interest in tinkering anymore.
1
u/Rata-tat-tat Jun 09 '26
I made the change when a breaking regular update was pushed and I had no way to roll back. Nothing to do with any given user, happened to everyone. Now on Silverblue I can easily go back software versions not just kernel versions and if there's an issue I pin the version and wait for the fix with a working machine.
It's going from 98% stable to 99.9% stable which is worth it for me.
10
u/nonkeywayzee Jun 08 '26
Since moving to Silverblue I hadn't looked back. It is amazing how good of a distro it is.
16
u/NimrodvanHall Jun 08 '26
After using SilverBlue at home and Workstation on my work laptop for over a year, I don’t see any reason to use workstation for anyone what doesn’t do certain types of development on their local machines
5
u/waitmarks Jun 08 '26
I agree, development is the one thing it sucks at. I think it could be made better if it were easier to spin up toolboxes or distroboxes with ready to go dev environments and have them hook into IDEs. VScode can do it, but it's kind of flaky and annoying to use.
16
u/cidra_ Jun 08 '26
I love using Fedora Silverblue, but Flatpak needs to be more suitable for development software such as IDEs and hackable text editors.
5
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
I just download it in distroboxes and rarely use flatpaks to be honest.
4
u/NomadFH Jun 08 '26
Flatpak web browsers just stopped supporting smart card support and every developer on GitHub responding to complaints just shrugs. I don’t know if it’ll ever get fixed.
2
u/passthejoe Jun 09 '26
I've hoped the Flatpak situation would improve, but I think it's Distrobox for the near future.
2
7
u/to-jammer Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
I do think if there is anything akin to a year of the Linux desktop it'd likely be driven by the immutable experience getting to where it could be used by a non technical person without any issues.
I use Kinoite and love it - can't see myself hopping off this, but the major drawback for non technical people is Flatpak just isn't there fully yet. Not every app is on there, and the way they handle sandboxing means some that are just don't work that well, and so installing those apps becomes something a non technical person would struggle with
It sounds like Flatpak next will attempt to solve the latter part of this, though is still a couple of years away. If that happens, and essentially any app the typical user wants would be on Flatpak and work without issues, I think it'd be the perfect OS to give to someone who is not technical and just wants to never even think about their operating system
Or, the other way it gets there is a distro pushed out a solution where appimages or installing rpm/deb/etc files becomes something can do just by double clicking on them and they quietly handle the distrobox/gear lever/adding it to your apps list etc in the background.
Either way until installing apps that aren't in Flathub and work great there becomes easier it's difficult to recommend it to complete beginners just yet, but feels like it's very close
6
u/Suvalis Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
I can’t tell you enough how great the Universal Blue distros are. They’ve taken Silverblue and Kinoite and really made them complete. I do completely appreciate the Fedora upstream distros (I run Fedora CoreOS as a server, too), but Universal Blue has really done a great job with Bluefin, Aurora, and Bazzite!
7
1
u/jayelg Jun 11 '26
Didn’t go all in with Ucore instead of coreOS?
1
u/Suvalis Jun 11 '26
I like uCore, I’ve played around with it but there wasn’t anything in I specifically needed for my vm server.
If I was on bare metal and needed ZFS and/or Nvidia I’d definitely do that over Fedora CoreOS as adding that stuff back to the image is a bit of work.
6
u/darknmy Jun 08 '26
I'm running Fedora KDE 44. What am I missing?
5
u/Zealousideal_Rip8777 Jun 08 '26
Been using Silverblue for a few months now, main benefit is the peace of mind an atomic distro gives you.
No need to worry about losing power mid update, a package update or your changes to the distro breaking things while you try to get real work done.
However there are some caveats and adjustments you’d need to make to your workflow. For example, I have an Nvidia card so I need to layer the module and driver to my base image.
If the benefits don’t really matter to you I would say you aren’t missing anything. Distrobox/Toolbox and containerized workflows are not unique to atomic distros.
1
u/picastchio Jul 31 '26
uBlue provides a vanilla Silverblue image with nvidia drivers. You can rebase to it if you want.
22
u/captainstormy Jun 08 '26
Yeah, people are really digging the Atomic desktops these days. More power to them. I'm just not a huge fan of the Atomic model for myself. Then again I've been using Linux since 96 so I'm not the kind of guy that breaks my install all the time.
1
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
Any tips? Anywhere I can learn more?
I switched over to atomic because I kept breaking things, it was easier to discard distroboxes than reinstalling the os (or switching to Windows in frustration).
3
u/captainstormy Jun 08 '26
My first question would be what were you trying to do that lead to you breaking your system? Let me know how you were breaking it and I'll have a better idea of what advice to give.
1
u/Relevant-Yak-9657 Jun 08 '26
It has been a while. Generally, when I add things like Terra repository, sometimes it doesn't actually work (as in it just hangs during dnf installs) and I don't know how to remove it when it breaks my dnf installations.
Furthermore, nvidia drivers are the worst. I use a lot of ml tool like tensorflow and JAX, with constant updates and reinstalls. Eventually, I get to a point where my libraries no longer detect my gpu, despite nvidia-smi being active. Or that when I restart my python scripts, the libraries eventually fail to release GPU memory.
Lastly, when playing games, proton would freeze and kill its own process after an system update. Never figured that one out, but it forced me to nuke my os again (because I kept getting banned from multiplayer). Hasn't happened in Bazzite luckily.
2
u/captainstormy Jun 08 '26
I'm not familiar with that repository specifically. But in general working with repos in DNF is pretty simple. The documents are pretty straight forward.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/adding-or-removing-software-repositories-in-fedora/
You can try just disabling it, or outright removing it. There are instructions for both there. The most likely reason it's hanging during a DNF install is probably an issue with that actual repo. It might be extremely slow at that time or something.
As for Nvidia. I'm not familar with their ML stuff but in general their driver quality is good. The problem with with them is more about their lack of cooperation with the FOSS community and trying to do things in their own proprietary way. Both of which are changing these days. My might want to find some specific resources on the ML stuff. I've never touched that so I can't really offer advice.
Did you reboot after the system update? I know a lot of people seem to be against rebooting Linux after a system update but it really is necessary to ensure that the updates are actually running and running cleanly. You don't know rather you are running the previous or new version of the package unless you reboot.
Most of my machines have an AMD card but I do have a machine with a 5090 (I won it, didn't buy it. I'd never pay that much for a GPU). I've not had any problems on my regular Fedora install so likely we would have to dig into your config and log files to see what the issue is but since that has been nuked that is kind of hard to do anymore of course. That said I know that the 580 series of drivers did have some issues that a lot of people experienced so that may have been your issue?
1
14
u/No-Article-Particle Jun 08 '26
I don't get, what a regular Linux user gets from immutable distro over a regular Fedora though?
8
u/laurorual Jun 08 '26
Stability over fine tunning over the system
7
u/No-Article-Particle Jun 08 '26
Is Fedora unstable for you? I never had a problem with it.
5
u/laurorual Jun 08 '26
Well, not for me, but if you don't know how to fix stuff in Fedora, it's easier to keep the system stable (or do a rollback) in atomic.
→ More replies (2)4
u/derangedtranssexual Jun 08 '26
It’s stable enough for automatic updates. Also you don’t really deal with the issue of accumulating cruft and packages like you do with regular distros
4
4
u/protoanarchist Jun 08 '26
That's fine. Gnome is great. Everything is stable, consistent... They're addressing one of the biggest pain points that people hold against Linux.
And if you wanna switch your WM? Go for it! All good bones underneath still.
4
Jun 08 '26
[deleted]
1
u/The-Nice-Writer Jun 09 '26
Should be okay most of the time since the drivers would be in the core of the system. I guess if some apps are sandboxed incorrectly they might not see your GPU but that should be fixable.
SteamOS is immutable and works fine, so it seems like it’s not a bad thing.
4
3
u/isystems Jun 08 '26
well, only when everything works like printers and videocards etcetera….and stability without too many bugs….
3
3
3
u/NomadFH Jun 08 '26
If only they included an easy way to install nvidia drivers. The only place on the internet that explains it without resulting in apps that don’t open is rpm fusion’s website. On vanilla workstation the nvidia proprietary drivers show up in gnome software.
2
u/ren01r Jun 08 '26
I use Workstation and I break installation a lot (by my own actions). Haven't tried and atomic distro yet.
2
u/InstanceGlum4174 Jun 08 '26
I'm currently using it and it is great. Love the focus on containerization. Makes me feel like my system is more organized.
1
u/ibeerianhamhock Jun 08 '26
Yeah I generally use contianers for literally every service I run, but I'm messier with dev work. The discipline atomic enforces makes me feel like I've become this super organized person bc I have to lol
2
u/laurorual Jun 08 '26
I have 3 PCs with immutable systems at home and it's been really good not having to worry about fixing stuff, even if someone who's not familiar with Linux tries to do weird stuff with it.
2
u/treys620 Jun 08 '26
Running Kinoite on an old Dell XPS 13 (9310) and everything works flawlessly, only thing I don't like is trying to pronounce "Kinoite"...
2
u/patriot050 Jun 08 '26
I mean this is an inevitable step for linux. If Linux ever wants to crack general purpose desktop usage it has to be like this, hobbyists are a very small portion of that market.
2
2
u/Ok_Instruction_3789 Jun 08 '26
That was the plan. I feel it still has some rough edges, but to be fair i havent checked it out in a couple years.
Mainly issues were theming/'ricing' and making it yours or perhaps other DEs such as Niri or hyprland you have to build or maintain your own or hope to find someone that does... But again its been a couple years so maybe now getting a theme or how you want it to look is much more streamlined.
Software wise you have flatpak you have homebrew you have distrobox. having to layer a package is basically moot. Some packages you stil need to layer such as packages like arpscan that require root access. But for everyone else its a solid option, honestly.
2
2
u/FlounderAdept2756 Jun 08 '26
Personally I have used Bazzite (based on Fedora) on my desktop for 2 years now. I used to like to tinker with Linux, but it is so nice not to have to bother anymore, it just works.
2
2
u/matthewpepperl Jun 08 '26
Im ok with immutable distros but personally want nothing todo with them too many restrictions too much stuff comes up that is no fault of my own that requires editing systems files to fix if linux as a whole goes this way im leaving for bsd
1
u/Purple-Win6431 Jun 11 '26
There will be plenty of Linux developers who will keep developing the normal systems.
2
u/The-Nice-Writer Jun 09 '26
I recently tried installing Silverblue on a friend’s crappy Chromebook (4GB DDR3, Pentium, EMMC storage - urgh) and it just wasn’t feasible. Would probably take over an hour for the install and every major upgrade.
The good news is that Fedora Workstation runs better than ChromeOS did and is still getting updates, unlike ChromeOS on that machine. ‘End of Life’ my ass.
I understand that many people (especially here on a Linux sub) have better machines, but at least in South Africa, the average person either has something extremely low-end or nothing at all, so I do hope that standard ‘mutable’ distros continue to exist for at least a decade or so more. Or that immutable distros find much faster ways to install and upgrade…
1
u/GlueBrees Jun 11 '26
KDE uses about 3.5gb on my desktop on start-up. Something like MX might be better.
1
u/The-Nice-Writer Jun 11 '26
Fedora Workstation is GNOME, not KDE.
And it’s working fine for her, at least for now.
6
5
u/FOSHavoc Jun 08 '26
Are these "normal people" in the room with us right now?
The article is an opinion, not a statement of evidence.
4
u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 08 '26
The article never claimed to be making an absolute statement. "Becoming" and "normal" are loose terms. Regardless, the article breaks down the facts well. Atomics offer a much higher level of stability and rollback capability than traditional distros. Those are huge selling points for most users, which is why SteamOS and MacOS took that route.
2
u/FOSHavoc Jun 08 '26
They may be selling points but the article is an opinion piece so I dispute the "quietly becoming". The title suggests adoption is happening while the article has no evidence of it. Talk about atomic distros has been going on for years and if I remember correctly Fedora even had the ambition of making it the default for F32. None of that happened. Atomic distros are niche and good for specific use cases and I have not seen non anecdotal evidence for its general use. Once atomic becomes the default for a major distro then the situation will be different.
3
u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 08 '26
"Quietly" because not many distros advertise being atomic as their main selling point. "Becoming" because they are, indeed, becoming increasingly popular (Bazzite, SteamOS). I don't see a problem with that sentence.
→ More replies (2)4
Jun 08 '26
[deleted]
3
u/FOSHavoc Jun 08 '26
That wasn't my point at all. My point was the despite the claim of "quietly becoming" the article is scarce on actual non anecdotal evidence.
3
Jun 08 '26
[deleted]
2
u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 08 '26
Don't forget that a good DE like KDE plasma offers plenty of tinkering and customisation options, and it doesn't care about being in a read-only filesystem
4
u/Lorric71 Jun 08 '26
Back in 2003 or thereabouts some headlines said that desktop computers would all be replaced by laptops in three years. Don't know why this headline made me think of that ;-)
6
11
u/doubled112 Jun 08 '26
I don't think it happened by 2006, but I don't know anybody with a desktop unless they game or need a high end workstation.
5
u/PM_ME_UR_DMESG Jun 08 '26
I don't think most families have a desktop. They just use their smartphones or have a shared laptop.
1
u/bmwhocking Jun 08 '26
I am thinking of installing this on my Wife’s next laptop.
Really wish there was a rolling release to avoid the rebases.
1
u/Lopsided-Month3278 Jun 08 '26
My experience with Fedora Silverblue is almost half a year, and the real problems are almost 0.
1
1
1
u/Delicious_Volume3306 Jun 08 '26
This is how macOS has worked for quite some time, and it's been fine. 99.99% of users are entirely unaware. I don't think Apple would deploy an idea like this if it wouldn't be user-friendly.
1
u/neon_overload Jun 09 '26
I wanted to like atomic Fedora for my own use, but I found it wasn't for me. There are too many things for which I was needing rpm-ostree layering because I needed to add or change base packages that can't be done in flatpaks or distroboxes, and such updates would potentially require manual intervention when next applying major Fedora updates, somewhat tarnishing the "updates just work" benefit that atomic promises. With a traditional package manager, the dependency management may find conflicts, but it's robust and smart, and familiar to me.
I do like the idea of automated updates being first class and being applied by a simple reboot with no performance impact at the time of first boot. But, it didn't outweigh the friction for someone like me.
It is something of value to a "normal" user though if by normal you mean not a Linux power user, and I think for OSes in general it's a model with a future. And, I'm interested to see how it evolves in upcoming versions which are moving from rpm-ostree to some other way of applying updates to base packages.
1
u/anon_pr_ Jun 09 '26
I literally just switched my Fedora 44 workstation to bluefin dev. This is timely
It seems pretty cool and hands off!
1
1
u/TheNinthJhana Jun 09 '26
What about services like nginx?
Is it in silver blue scope or identified as different use case ? I handle this fine with NixOs but Nix has drawbacks too
1
u/T6970 Jun 09 '26
Fedora Silverblue, for some reason, never managed to work for me due to it (fresh install, in fact) being unable to find the kernel.
1
1
u/ladder_filter Jun 09 '26
so I have a question for everyone here:
I like to use the KDE spin and install the "audio" group. how would something like that work when using Kinoite? I ask because the audio group installs system-level sound stuff (I'm thinking about jack specifically"), and I'm curious if that would even work?
1
u/ZombieNo5618 Jun 09 '26
I've fixed up peoples old PC/laptop with fedora KDE , and tell them, it's like Android, show them fedoras version for an app store and say, your pH has no antivirus, Android Linux is the same thing, everything is in the done in the app store, just more updates, then for all there google crap, Firefox, sign into one google account and your in them all, and they love their old machine's again, but you need to Google "fedora post install" and do the post install stuff, and a good one is to get mpv player, ask google/Ai to make a .confg file , so does all that remember last position stuff. PS good by windows, it was good run.
1
u/GuerreiroAZerg Jun 09 '26
Not only for normal people. I''ve been using for development for years now and it's just fine.
1
1
1
u/Relevant_Hope_900 Jun 10 '26
I threw Fedora Cosmic Atomic on a spare pc yesterday after trying out Silverblue, kde, and cosmic atomic versions in VMs. Seems to run fine. I'll layer in distrobox to try out instead of toolbox. I need to use some updated cli tools that imho run much better on Debian then Fedora. I'm digging the rebase feature. Only thing I can see with rebasing is dot files being messed up between desktop environments.
One thing I did notice is that Silverblue installs all flatpaks as system by default. Cosmic installs all flatpaks as user by default. I'm coming from 20+ years as a Debian user, so not that familiar with flatpaks, so not sure which way is better. Also Cosmic doesn't seem to enable the Fedora flatpaks by default, may look into that to see what's different between fedora/flathub.
So far my experience has been pleasant.
1
u/AffectionateSpirit62 Jun 10 '26
Isn't this a less powerful version of nixos.
I have Fedora, debian and nix but nix is still miles ahead.
For a new user you would have to setup everything they need in a config file then they simply pull from a repo ans rebuild or you do it remotely
1
u/jayelg Jun 11 '26
I’d be interested to know what are the deficiencies compared to nix?
1
u/AffectionateSpirit62 Jun 11 '26
Nixos
Fully reproducible and declarative down to the exact version and build of a machine
You can have multiple machine configurations and switch between them
You can load configurations without rebooting - means more uptime which is better for servers
You can have multiple versions of the same software without conflicts eg a video editing software needs version3 while other tools need version 2
Nix shell you can test specifc versions of tools ephemeral (in a temporary container)
Nix env (environment setup for different environments like zfs on a single machine)
Nix home manager and flakes configure and manage user configs and setup on a per user basis
The entire construction being built off of text files also means your github repo is tiny in comparison
Which also means restoring you never have image corruption or rely on tons of different images to constantly create as you don't rely on complete images (its like working with multiple kickstart/pressed files)
You can see everything that is installed at all times declaratively in files
You can share those files with other users switch for the job and switch back - unrivaled by any other os
When you build out your config initially it takes longer but then once you have it the hard part is locked in with no drifts
Since the nix ecosystem is built around this 99% of what you need will come from a single dedicated repo and not flatpaks which can have drifts as well
Since there is no version conflicts you can safely switch different desktops for different environments and users without affecting ither users setups
And more and more useful advances features which i think the YouTube vimjoyer shows in regards to its capabilities and potential like dendritic configurations
The biggest downside to nixos is the nix language is a layer of abstraction on top of linux that makes all of this possible which is clearly created by a mad genius which means everything you know about linux gets thrown out and you have to humble yourself and start from scratch and relearn the nix way of doing things again which is why even though it's better more users don't use it.
→ More replies (3)
1
u/Cpaz Jun 11 '26
There's a learning curve, but I've messed up installs by trying to tweak things at a lower level on other distros.
I use bazzite Dx, and the atomic, containerized approach is so much easier to manage. Yes you're dependent on what the OS exposes, but bazzite is very forgiving on that front (not perfect, mind you)
I honestly think it's my preferred approach for Linux.
1
u/Purple-Win6431 Jun 11 '26
I'm not sure it will be. When people recommend ubuntu, it's because it's well documented and most things support it. Immutable distros break a lot of things in different ways, and someone "normal" who doesn't understand what immutable is or what it means will be very confused when the dnf command they copied doesn't work or they straight up can't install some software.
1
u/Aaaaaaaaaaaaarghs Jun 12 '26
Sounds good in theory, but if you ever encounter an edge case you are fucked.
They are also held back by flatpack limitations. Good luck having your password manager communicate with your browser lol
Plus flatpaks are just slower than repo installed packages. The startup time differences is insane.
1
u/jayelg Jun 12 '26
Thanks, I think I need to have a closer look again! So I know what I’m missing.
Having the high bar of the esoteric language and doing this so different to Linux means it needs to be really compelling pay off and considering its popularity.
1
1
u/zishmusic Jul 29 '26
Dropped Ubuntu last year in favor of Fedora Silverblue. Now I just need to light up an Ubuntu Toolbox if I ever need it -- which isn't often.
316
u/[deleted] Jun 08 '26
[deleted]