In my experience, Silverblue already works pretty well as a drop-in replacement for Workstation for users who use their computers largely as Chromebooks – web browsing, basic document processing. These people use the GUI exclusively and expect whatever they need to be a few clicks away.
Power users – developers, scientists, users of professional apps – will be more difficult to convert. Those people have built up many years of habits and experiences with Fedora Workstation, particularly related to software management, and not all of them will work directly on Silverblue. For instance, if they want to stand up a web server, they might do dnf install nginx followed by systemctl enable nginx, which is almost possible on Silverblue but not really how Silverblue is intended to be used.
Fedora developers should enumerate common tasks and workflows in Fedora Workstation and make recommendations for how to map them to Silverblue, keeping in mind the intended audiences of Fedora Workstation. The reason is that there are sometimes multiple overlapping alternatives for a given workflow or none at all.
For example:
- How should I install graphical apps? Of course Flatpak is probably the default recommendation, but what if the Flatpak version is crippled or doesn’t exist at all?
- Linux has a plethora of useful CLI tools. How should I install them? For example, what should I do if I want to convert images using ImageMagick?
- What about applications that have a combination of GUI, CLI, and system-level components?
- What about various servers? SSH, VNC, VPN, databases, etc.
- What about professional apps distributed as standalone RPMs or binary installers?
- How do I build and run software distributed as source tarballs? If I were using Fedora Workstation I’d probably start with
dnf install gcc, make, libXYZetc. - How do I deal with drivers distributed through DKMS, such as Virtualbox or ZFS?
One should keep in mind only whether it’s possible to accomplish these tasks on Silverblue but how easy it is to do so. Cumbersome workarounds such as this one should probably be solved before Silverblue is marketed to the masses.
Some recommended best practices for using Silverblue will also be helpful. For example, various internet forums suggest using Toolbox todnf install software that don’t have suitable Flatpaks. But since Toolbox is essentially Fedora Workstation in a container without systemd or automatic updates, one is liable to accumulate a lot of out of date software if one lives primarily in a Toolbox container.