Are Silverblue and the other Atomic versions the future?

Ask Fedora
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Hi,

Are Silverblue and the other Atomic distro’s the future that will replace traditional distributions?

I’m running workstation and thinking of switching to Silverblue, I’m just unsure on whether to do it now or hold on for a while. I’m not a dev, I don’t need system level access etc. HOwever I have read of updates in Silverblue taking much longer than in workstation. Obviously I understand the whole image gets updated.

On my workstation every preinstalled app such as clock, maps etc I’ve switched out for the flatpak version. And all but 2 of the apps I’ve installed myself are all flatpak’s too.

Would it be worth jumping to Silverblue now or waiting a while? I’ve been running it in a VM without issue, I installed my Nvidia driver and everything is running smooth.

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The atomics might (probably?) become the default Fedora experience on the website’s front page eventually*, though the traditionals will still be around.

*once the bootc stuff is sorted, and after a lot of arguing.

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Thank you for your reply. I might stick to silverblue in a VM for now.

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Fedora Atomic Desktops wont be replacing Workstation anytime soon.

As per the latest Fedora Strategy 2028 community blog post, Fedora has added “Atomic Desktops and Image Mode” to the Technical Innovation themes.

Yet it’s going to take a mountain of work till Atomic desktops becomes mature enough for Fedora to even propose for the Atomic desktops to become an Edition.

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Thank you.

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Numbers/source would be nice here as I don’t think that’s true.

On Atomic Desktops, updates are prepared in the background and you reboot to get the new version. Thus depending on how you see things, the updates can be considered instantaneous.

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I got that information from a single post on r/Fedora. Thank you for your reply.

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I’ve daily driven Silverblue for the past year, updates and package changes do take longer than dnf-based Fedora systems.

However, this is not accurate due to the nature of OSTree. Update duration is essentially equivalent to your download time + time to layer installed packages + time to reboot.

On a bare Silverblue system, it took about 2m30s to download an update at 20MiB/s and reboot
On my personal Silverblue system, I layer around 84 packages, for a total update times to around 4m.
If there are no updates to download and I just wanted to install a new package then it takes about 2m.

This is factoring in time to reboot of about a 1m too

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Thank you for the reply.

How did you install the codecs? That’s the only thing holding me back really.

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So, for an average user would silverblue be the better option? or workstation?

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I really can’t decide what to do: Switch to Silverblue or stick with Workstation.

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The atomic desktops still have issues as the configuration is worked out, while the basic editions that use rpm are tried and true.

Updates on Workstation are done piecemeal (individual packages ) so download times are usually much shorter. Updates on the atomic releases are done by downloading a complete new image of the system and installing it all at once, thus the download time is much longer and larger for each update.

Personally I remain on Workstation rather than switch to Silverblue.

You should decide if the easy, smaller, and stable updates for Workstation are better or if you like the atomic method used on Silverblue.

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Thank you. I’m going to stick with Workstation. I’ll use Silverblue in a VM to see how I like it.

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I have created the script that installs all the codecs and it handles the atomic versions too.

though i did not have the opportunity to try it on silverblue yet as the isos are not live ones.

you can run it with a single command in your vm

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supertico/fedora-open264-geoblock-fix/main/fedora-cisco-403-mitigation.sh | sudo bash

and tell how it goes

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That’s brilliant! Thank you very much.

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Thank you. I’m installing Silverblue in a VM right now.

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Just an update: Silverblue is running great in a VM. With the help from here I’ve got everything setup such as codecs and my NVidia driver.

I’m seriously considering giving Silverblue a 4 week trial as my main OS installed directly on my system to really test it out.

Thank you all for your help.

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I think this speaks for itself as the future of immutable/atomic systems. It’s the future, and not very far away. All my 4 machines at home(2 wife, 2 mine) are all Bluefin for many months, which is derived from Silverblue. Four Years of Universal Blue | Bluefin

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Silverblue is fantastic, and Bluefin is even better. More curated.