Hello,
I 've recently read some Fedora articles about Silverblue and decided to test it out. My experience with it has been mostly positive, but I am not sure I could replace my normal F32 installation with it. I made my tests through Gnome Boxes. Below are notable details of my experience.
-
rpm-ostree
is awesome, I was able to easily learn how to upgrade with it. - The ability to layer packages is also very useful. I used this functionality to layer important packages like
gnome-shell-extension-appindicator
andgnome-shell-extension-dash-to-dock
. - I was also pleasantly surprised on the ability to customise parts of the root filesystem, mainly
/etc
. I have purchased solo USB-C open firmware FIDO2 keys and I was able to apply the modifications needed to authenticate with a solokey instead of using the password. The changes to/etc/
even persisted a couplerpm-ostree
upgrades which surprised me.
Unfortunately there have been also some problems.
- The
nextcloud-client
app when installed from flatpak does not show a tray icon. If thenextcloud-client
is installed as a layered package the tray icon appears. - The Geary app when installed from a flatpak cannot print an email to a file. I 'm guessing this can again be sidestepped by layering it as a package.
As you can see my problems resolve mostly around flatpaks and the fact that they are not yet considered as much by application developers. It’s good that there is the escape hatch of layering packages but I feel that if I were to use that extensively it kind of defeats the purpose.
Some additional notes:
- Is there a way to see older ostree commits though? The ability to do rollbacks is good, but
rpm-ostree status
only shows 1 commit back. - It appears that you cannot do rollbacks from flatpaks intalled from the fedora repo. That is rather unfortunate.
If the proposal to move to Btrfs for F33 passes I may be tempted to install Fedora SilverBlue 33 but I am afraid that the application ecosystem is not there yet to avoid paper cuts when using a lot of open source applications. And layering the packages to avoid those paper cuts kind of defeats the purpose.
I still have the VM in my machine and I’ be happy to do more testing or change how I 've configured some things if other people have any suggestions.