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What is Silverblue?

fedoramagazine.org

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Re: What is Silverblue?

#131

Post by aleks_me2 »

wwright wrote: post #84
tannhaeuser wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I whish others could see this as what it is - a push to make everything so overcomplicated and repository-locked in the name of security that you need endless maintenance and a support contract to run even basic software on your PC, thereby taking F/OSS ad absurdum . When in reality we haven't seen significant end-user F/OSS in almost a decade.

On workstations and laptops, no, but I work in enterprise and a _lot_ of Linux appliances out in the wild could benefit from this.

Well the question is will the enterprise Software Vendor like Citrix, IBM, Dell, HP and so on port there Software to this new Package format. Even for today it's difficult to run some SW/HW tools on "Linux" as the vendors support only a small amount of Linux distribution with specific versions.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#132

Post by aleks_me2 »

davidmr wrote: post #87
tannhaeuser wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I whish others could see this as what it is - a push to make everything so overcomplicated and repository-locked in the name of security that you need endless maintenance and a support contract to run even basic software on your PC, thereby taking F/OSS ad absurdum . When in reality we haven't seen significant end-user F/OSS in almost a decade.

What evidence to you have to suggest this extremely uncharitable interpretation of the Fedora project’s aims?

What's the aim of the Fedora project to Silverblue?

Re: What is Silverblue?

#133

Post by bubblethink »

okasaki wrote: post #69

This seems poorly motivated. > What are the benefits of an immutable OS? > One of the main benefits is security. The base operating system is mounted as read-only, and thus cannot be modified by malicious software. The only way to alter the system is through the rpm-ostree utility. How is this different from the current experience? "Operating system" files already aren't writable by the user. The only way to alter th…

Uggh. This is such juvenile criticism about something that you do not understand. You really need to look at the design of most modern(ish) operating systems in the last few years including Android and ChromeOS which are already mentioned in the article.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#134

Post by leonlag »

I'm a fedora user and I just gave silverblue a try. The idea itself is great but in it's current state it's basically unusable for me.

A lot of application I use are command line based and are simply not available via flatpak. You have to install these via rpm-ostree but that requires a reboot every time you install anything.

Moreover many GUI applications that are available in the fedora repos are simply not packaged as flatpaks and either require rpm-ostree and a subsequent reboot or adding a third party repository like flathub. I really don't want to give up fedoras mostly excellent repos to rely on some badly packaged, possibly malicious container.

After not being able to find my preffered media player mpv, I settled for VLC from flathub. It installed just fine but video playback was completely broken, VLC installed via rpm-ostree worked.

I also don't understand how you are supposed to install patent encumbered codecs for firefox. Usually this is solved by adding the rpmfusion repos but with firefox being installed via a flatpak from the fedora repos, this obviously does not work.

I'll probably check this out again in ~2 years and see if it's any better.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#135

Post by okasaki »

bubblethink wrote: post #133
okasaki wrote: post #69

This seems poorly motivated. > What are the benefits of an immutable OS? > One of the main benefits is security. The base operating system is mounted as read-only, and thus cannot be modified by malicious software. The only way to alter the system is through the rpm-ostree utility. How is this different from the current experience? "Operating system" files already aren't writable by the user. The only way to alter th…

Uggh. This is such juvenile criticism about something that you do not understand. You really need to look at the design of most modern(ish) operating systems in the last few years including Android and ChromeOS which are already mentioned in the article.

Clearly I don't understand, and neither the article nor you were of any help.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#136

Post by yeahforsureman »

leonlag wrote: post #134

I'm a fedora user and I just gave silverblue a try. The idea itself is great but in it's current state it's basically unusable for me. A lot of application I use are command line based and are simply not available via flatpak. You have to install these via rpm-ostree but that requires a reboot every time you install anything. Moreover many GUI applications that are available in the fedora repos are simply not package…

For development workflows, command line applications and such, I think you're supposed to go the container route via Toolbox. So you will have dnf etc.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#137

Post by bubblethink »

okasaki wrote: post #135
bubblethink wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uggh. This is such juvenile criticism about something that you do not understand. You really need to look at the design of most modern(ish) operating systems in the last few years including Android and ChromeOS which are already mentioned in the article.

Clearly I don't understand, and neither the article nor you were of any help.

If you want to guard against persistent malware, you don't want your system partition to be writable. You also additionally need a chain of trust in the boot process to get to this (trusted and signed) immutable file system. That still leaves the issue of user-downloaded apps/code and how to run them securely in a sandboxed manner. Which Android does reasonably well, but it is perhaps too restrictive for server/general use cases which silverblue is trying to address.

About the configuration issue, if configurations are transactional, you get transactional properties. And that would be quite significant. If you hose your system with an apt/yum update, you don't have much recourse unless you also took a filesystem snapshot before it (which you can do with zfs/btrfs/lvm-thin etc. and people shoehorn these things for precisely this reason). They are all different means to approximate the same end which is transactional package management.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#138

Post by okasaki »

bubblethink wrote: post #137
okasaki wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly I don't understand, and neither the article nor you were of any help.

If you want to guard against persistent malware, you don't want your system partition to be writable. You also additionally need a chain of trust in the boot process to get to this (trusted and signed) immutable file system. That still leaves the issue of user-downloaded apps/code and how to run them securely in a sandboxed manner. Which Android does reasonably well, but it is perhaps too restrictive for server/gener…

System files aren't writable by normal users in any Linux distribution.

System recovery from backups is pretty easy and well understood too, so I'm not sure what benefit this would bring.

If you want transactions you can install on btrfs and use apt-btrfs-snapshot to automatically take snapshots. It seems this isn't that well-known though, probably because the problem it solves isn't very serious.

As for Android, it's already a frustrating system on phones, something like that on desktops would be total trash.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#139

Post by edwintorok »

snuxoll wrote: post #109
dorfsmay wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a dev version of silver Blue where you can install/remove package on the fly, and maybe commit and reboot once you're ready?

`ostree admin unlock` will make the current image writable.

Yeah thats pretty useful for some quick hacking, it is all lost on a reboot though.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#140

Post by snuxoll »

edwintorok wrote: post #139
snuxoll wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`ostree admin unlock` will make the current image writable.

Yeah thats pretty useful for some quick hacking, it is all lost on a reboot though.

The —hotfix flag would remedy that. Honestly though it’s all fighting the design of the system, really there for developers to break things.
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