What are the pros and cons for desktops ? EDIT : Thanks all. I’ll try Silverblue, bazzite and more.
In order to avoid headaches I wouldn’t use one today. Instead I’d use a stable OS like Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS, and use an immutable systems to get applications that are too old in the main repos. For example via Flatpak, Snap and Docker. Stable OSes eliminate most of the non-user caused breakage. The remainder is learning to not break it yourself, which isn’t horribly difficult. Once Debian or Ubuntu release an immutable desktop OS, I’d try it.
I tried Silverblue for about an hour. Got pretty sick of “Changes queued for next boot. Run ‘systemctl reboot’ to start a reboot” real quick. I don’t see how this is an improvement.
You know you can apply live, I do it for when pretty much anything except a kernel update is queued, works fine even if it warns you when you do it
I do not know that. I’m still failing to see the point of this overly-complicated setup though. apt install git “just works.”
A reproducible system, delivered in a working state where anything you add is overlayed on top without effecting that system. Branches you can move between Fedora numbered versions as well as going Kinoite to Silverblue, while keeping the same stuff you layered on it.
It’s truly git for your OS
You should be installing software with stuff like flatpak, toolbox or distrobox. If you treat the immutable image as a mutable one there really isn’t an improvement except for less of a chance of instability of updating/changing software that’s running in memory already.
I’d just like to add that after using ubuntu (as a newbie), then arch for several years I recently switched to bazzite (atomic fedora with steam/gaming focus) on my daily driver.
It is SO NICE to have everything just work. And steam games that I never got working on other distros just run out of the box. Everything just works, and it doesn’t feel bloated at all like ubuntu.
If you want to tinker with the system, if you want to install multiple DEs, if you want to test and change things on your own, you may not like the rigidity of atomic systems.
If you don’t want to tinker with your system and you always want to have a working system, go for it.
In the future it will become easier to tinker with the system (I hope that it doesn’t take the path of android). I hope that more happens within containers and that it mature even more. Maybe the de within a distrobox? That would be awesome but I don’t no the downside of it.
Right now you are still an early adopter. It sounds like the future and for many it will be, but who know what’s next. Especially companies have an interest in fedora’s atomic distros with ostree.
I’ve been using microos exactly because I like to tinker. Just the other day I installed plasma 6 to play around with the HDR implementation, then decided that it wasn’t worth it and rolled everything back. Worse case scenario I might have needed to reset kde configs in my home directory, but even that want necessary.
With fedora atomic, lets say i wanted to try out kde desktop for a while. i would first pin my current build so i can roll back to it if i dont end liking kde with
$ sudo ostree admin pin 0
Then i would rebase to the kde branch with
$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/39/x86_64/kinoite
Then just reboot. That’s literally it and i would have a kde system with all my layered packages and i could roll back to my old system at anytime.
