Hello all!
I am about to fresh install one of my boxes and decided to try one of te atomic releases.
But how does it compares to regular spins?
Is that true that it’s simple, clean and easy to rebase, let’s say, kinoite from and to silverblue?
What should i be aware regarding the daily usage of a atomic spin? Is it more like a rolling release (with bleeding edge kernel) or can i deal with it as a regular spin?
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
The only thing you have to remember is that install everyapp as flatpak, if not available look for appimage or binary file.
Some tools you have to install as system package (NVIDIA driver).
It means the installation is read only. You can not write to the OS as it selves. Config paths are mapped on a writable user space (see Kinoite as example), so that you can do some configuration.
It is more or less the same as a RPM (Legacy) installation. It might be a view moments behind it. As already mentioned above, you will get a full new image to replace your old base. But going back if something not works should be no problem.
The atomic approach sounds quite nice in principle, but one thing that feels a little awkward is the part about rpm-ostree:
When a package is installed with
rpm-ostree, a new OS image is composed by adding the RPM payload to the existing OS image, and creating a new, combined image. To see the newly installed RPMs, the system needs to be rebooted with the new image. rpm-ostree also takes care of recreating the layered image whenever you update the base OS image.
I have a bunch of small little cli tools installed as rpm, and it feels a bit problematic that installing each of those would trigger the creation of a new OS image and required a reboot. Is that what would happen in practice? Also how does the creation of new images affect the used physical diskspace?
Is toolbox not working for you? Or are you using it in the toolbox already.
It is like a copy of what you have plus that what you installed and eventually some updates. Of course you can not have all images stored on your computer if you have limited space.
But rebasing and downloading an older image is always possible … just you have to layer the software again, right?!
Oh i’m not using an atomic version right now, i only have experience with Workstation so i was just wondering how things worked. 
You can install all your small cli (and/or gui) packages at once, with only one reboot required.
I am fairly new to Silverblue myself, and have not explored toolboxes yet. That’s next on my list…
I recommend Distrobox, as it includes quite some important features, not only quality-of-life. like separated home directories.
Without sugar-coating, there’s probably good reason why Workstation is mentioned first and everything else under a sub-category/secondary still.
I’d say it depends on your expectations and how interested you are in Linux to determine how far you’d be willing to go with troubleshooting. If you just want an OS to toss onto a computer and only use apps, no system-nitty-gritty, uptime-at-all-costs, an Atomic spin might be best, but I’d also question why not just go with Windows 
If you want traditional Linux with direct access to files (not being behind layers/sandbox), non-Atomic.
If you want safety and protection from breaking stuff too-badly, Atomic. If you know enough about rebase to consider it before needing it, you probably don’t need safety features