Coreos vs. silverblue & kinoite as daily driver

I have just recently started experimenting with kinoite and silverblue. But I am wondering if it is possible instead to use coreos as a daily driver with the whole desktop environment (and anything else silverblue/kinoite have beyond coreos) installed in a toolbox. This of course implies no easy way to use a display manager for logins - requiring instead terminal login, then launching the desktop environment using toolbox run (with some care to place wayland and X11 sockets and auth files where they are accessible outside the toolbox by flatpaks). Other than that, it may have advantages: it may provide a way to develop the desktop environment itself, it may limit the size of the base OS even further (which means smaller and less frequent updates), it may allow trying DEs or WMs other than KDE or GNOME, and even with KDE and GNOME trying updates that are not yet in kinoite or silverblue.

Is using coreos this way a workable scenario?

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I don’t know anyone doing this with Fedora CoreOS but I have seen others try to do something similar on Container focused offerings.

I think my advice here is that this is a path that very few people are following so you’ll probably spend a lot of time debugging and create something bespoke to you. If that sounds like fun then you should go for it. If it doesn’t sound fun and you can’t afford the extra time, then I would suggest going for something like Silverblue or Kinoite.

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I have some experience getting X11 window managers working on other
very basic cloud-focused distros (alpine), but never tried it with
wayland, or from within a container, and never where there wasn’t some
path already defined for doing so. I’m up for fun learning
experiences, but I’d like to have some idea that the path ahead isn’t a
dead end.

Also, is my hypothesis true that basing on coreos would result in fewer
and smaller ostree updates? I have been working with kinoite for a
few weeks and finding that the ostree updates are pretty frequent,
sizeable and slow. Having to cope with these, as well as hitting some
bugs in KDE (which I prefer to GNOME) is what provoked this idea of
starting with coreos instead.

I’m also wondering if anyone else is interesting in pursuing this idea
of using coreos as a daily driver.

Thanks,
Jonathan

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Yes. Regularly scheduled updates for Fedora CoreOS happen about every 2 weeks. I think Silverblue and Kinoite would like to do something similar in the future, but no work has been done to achieve that goal yet.