Been using Silverblue for a couple of years and dipped over to NixOS for a project.
I’m all giddy for immutable systems to take over, because it is truly the safest way a user can run a system. The added bonus being system rollback is built-in by default and not some secondary service.
I’m helping a friend out with his laptop from time to time. They’ve used Linux Mint XFCE for many years and it’s set to auto update. Now I got asked to help since the system stopped auto updating with an error message every boot. Seems like an issue with dpkg but I didn’t have time so I don’t know how to.fix it yet.
Another device is running Fedora Silverblue for a year or two and the only issue was an update failing because of some dependencie issue. But simply removing all overlayed packages and installing them again fixed it in no time.
I’ve also been using NixOS for a few months on my pc, laptop and server and it’s great. Image based OS aren’t flexible enough for my liking but are great for low maintenance setups.
They aren’t meant to be “flexible”. Immutable means it’s static, read only. You replace one image with another.
In the case of Silverblue you install using overlays, like Flatpak or toolbox/podman.
With NixOS you do get images, but in the form of clojures. BUT it also handles environments on a fundamental level, so you don’t need to reboot to install new system applications or services.
Have you considered Vanilla OS? There’s also uBlue, but I have hopes for Vanilla because it is user-firsf distro, whereas uBlue is more an off-shoot of Silverblue meant for users, but Ruth and same issues as with Silverblue.
Vanilla 2.0 is coming up soon and it seems like a great alternative for people with little to no know-how, or people who don’t want to mess around and find out.
Immutable can be flexible, just like NixOS is with nix shell and other features I don’t yet know about.
Containers are great but rootless has issues with programs that need capabilties like CAP_NET_RAW, so I also need rootful containers. That’s annoying and is an advantage with nix shell.
I’m not a fan of A/B root, which I believe VanillaOS uses. Also an advantage of NixOS is it’s big repo… On Fedora I had to package some programs myself in copr (tried out a less well-known wayland compositor) On NixOS I had to too, but it’s far simpler without the need to build on someone else’s infrastructure.
and follows closest with my political views (I value free software(…)), which Fedora Silverblue is one of the few that provides.
Reading this, anyone would think that red had is not in the middle of a controversy for violating the GPL license.
Fedora is, at least in theory, 100% community maintained and owned.
Red Hat sponsors this project (developers and money), in the hopes, that most of it gets upstreamed to RHEL, acting as a “testing ground”.
It happened often, and will happen again many times, that the Fedora team decides against interests of RH.
It’s a great symbiosis: we, as a community, get an extremely well maintained and professional distro, and RH gets feedback.
Also, side note, the “advertisement” of the RH-ecosystem works. If it weren’t because of CasaOS (the web interface and docker management), I would use Almalinux (RHEL clone) instead of Debian, since I’m just used to Fedora and feel more confident in it.
It kinda is. Most of the package maintainers are Red Hat or IBM employees. Red Hat has special roles in the governance structure which no other organisation has. Red Hat provides pretty much all the technical infrastructure (web hosting, repositories, build servers etc.) to the project gratis. Red Hat even own the trademarks to the Fedora name and logo.
The community governance structure is real and good, but it’s denying reality to pretend that Fedora isn’t tightly bound to Red Hat.
I’ve used Fedora kinoite for at least a year now, it’s pretty good
I was just looking at that today. Im in my search to leave ubuntu after 10 years
You can try fedora. The workstation if you love GNOME, otherwise the KDE spin.
Always love TheEvilSkeleton’s takes, it feels like I’m reading my own experiences and opinions
(yes, I am saying they’re literally me, frfr)
