I know that Silverblue and Kinoite are more established, but I would have liked to see a consistent rebrand. "Fedora GNOME Atomic" is a better name for the same reasons that "Fedora Sway Atomic" is.
Fedora Atomic Desktops
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#22If anyone isnt aware, Fedora is currently the GOAT OS. Don't knock it until you try it. Everything just works, and it works like the Platonic form of a desktop should. A Fedora Cinnamon Atomic would be a wet dream for me. I'm surprised that wasnt prioritized. Budgie Desktop looks interesting.
I tried getting to Fedora but the package manager was slower even to deb, the hardware video acceleration in browsers required me to juggle drivers from fusion due to licensing problems, and I use AMD which I would expect to not have issues.
Try using the flatpak version of browsers. Acceleration should work ootb
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#23I never tried Fedora before, but a few weeks ago Bluefin got mentioned here and I went down a hole reading about Universal Blue and ended up making my own spin. Love it. Immutable is incredible
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#24Ugh, the Sway/Kinoite Atomic spin is so tempting for me as a regular Fedora user. Two weeks ago, a kernel update borked my laptop, and for some reason it deleted the older versions, so I was forced to live boot, chroot, and install a beta kernel. A few days ago, my desktop stopped booting - something to do with Nvidia drivers, and older kernels don't help. I don't have the time to try and fix it any time soon. But, t…
> a kernel update borked my laptop, and for some reason it deleted the older versions
Deleted older versions? That sounds severe. I hope you filed a bug report if there wasn't one already.
Did you change your installonly_limit?
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#25I just got into Silverblue (also love Nix), and I really feel that it's the way Linux "should be". I say this as a Linux user since 1999. If you haven't checked it out, imagine that the base (read-only) operating system (drivers, etc) changes in a very controlled and atomic fashion while all your userland stuff is updated via Flatpak (or Distrobox, etc). The odds of breaking your system are virtually zero, and everything works out of the box. It's amazing.
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#26I knew what Silverblue was and was decently certain about Kinoite, but had heard about neither Onyx nor Sericea. I think the rebranding is a smart move here for both brand recognition and searchability. I might have gone a step further and renamed the Gnome and KDE versions as well.
Beyond the naming change, I'm really excited about those projects. I strongly belive that atomicity is the way to go and believe that eventually many distributions will evolve in that direction. Right now I think the tradeoffs are already worth it, but there may be a ways to go before I'd recommend it as the default for new users. (Even if they might in particular profit from easy error recovery.)
EDIT: I want to add that the easy error recoverability that atomicity provides isn't just important for errors upstream that break one of your upgrades, it also enables much more experimentation. I have learned a lot more Linux systems because I was able to fearlessly tinker with many integral parts that I would never have touched in a traditional system for fear of having to reinstall. After all, if I broke it, all I had to to was to reboot to unbreak it!
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#27I like the idea of atomic base systems; it's very BSD-like. I may have to give this a try.
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#28If you're not familiar, the Atomic project is really interesting. Its focus is stability and reproducibility, trying to solve the fragility that can happen when the default way to use software in Linux is `sudo apt-get install`.
There's a community offshoot called Universal Blue (after the original Atomic image Silverblue). It uses the standards set for containerization to make userland configuration reproducible as well. There's a manifest (Containerfile) that enumerates all the modifications, which means an upgrade is bump the version of the base image and replay all the modifications from the manifest. It's also meant to limit `sudo` usage, so you're not in the habit of giving root to random software you downloaded from the internet.
Their most famous image is Bazzite, which will replicate the SteamOS experience on generic hardware. They also have Bluefin for software developers.
I haven't used it myself, but I find the concept fascinating. I expect Jorge and Kyle from that project will find their way to these comments.
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#29I really like Silverblue and run it on a couple of secondary machines (like in my workshop), but it’s still rough for anything off the beaten path.
The largest pain points for me:
- Any kernel modules. I know Ublue has images but I wish Red Hat would just have an official solution that doesn’t require hacky RPMs and such.
- Kernel cmdline args or any initramfs changes: can’t package in image and need to be applied manually. Maybe it’s possible to build a custom initramfs to distribute?
- Secure boot and enrolling moks is very annoying. My current workstation just uses sbctl to sign a UKI against custom keys and everything “just works”. This is part of why kernel modules are a pain in Silverblue too.
If you don’t care about kernel modules with secure boot it’s quite nice though. Practically zero maintenance.
Re: Fedora Atomic Desktops
#30Ugh, the Sway/Kinoite Atomic spin is so tempting for me as a regular Fedora user. Two weeks ago, a kernel update borked my laptop, and for some reason it deleted the older versions, so I was forced to live boot, chroot, and install a beta kernel. A few days ago, my desktop stopped booting - something to do with Nvidia drivers, and older kernels don't help. I don't have the time to try and fix it any time soon. But, t…
I use Bazzite. It includes nix and fleek, so you can easily install packages from the massive nixos ecosystem. I then add JetPack's devbox which is another nix porcelain and use it with direnv to install custom packages for each of my projects. And I have a few distrobox's (toolbox on generic Silverblue) to do things like build Debian packages.
Bazzite's sibling Bluefin is specifically meant for developers (the bluefin-dx image) and standard daily driver. Bazzite is targeted more towards gaming and Steam handheld although you can use it as a desktop too.