How to test Fedora Silberblue

I just used a spare laptop I had lying around and installed it on there. Well, I had Silverblue 29 on it and just rebased to 30 so I don’t know how the installer is working for 30.

Gordy

My laptop has two 1TB SSDs with around 22 btrfs subvols, and if btrfs isn’t working correctly here then I will not switch. For the time being I’ll play with it in a VM to get some familiarity with ostree.

I’ve always read alot about btrfs being trash. Isn’t that why redhat wound up just using xfs?

From: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/7.4_Release_Notes/chap-Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-7.4_Release_Notes-Deprecated_Functionality.html

Btrfs has been deprecated:
The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The Btrfs file system did receive numerous updates from the upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 and will remain available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series. However, this is the last planned update to this feature.

I’ve always been afraid to use it for anything i cared about.

I’ve been using btrfs for 4-5 years and I never had any problems. It is very convenient to use. Pretty much the same as zfs.

Regarding xfs. Yes, Redhat is working on stratis which uses xfs as file system. But stratis isn’t yet usable.

Glad to hear you’ve had a good experience with it.

I use it on my private and my company laptop. Of course, on top of LUKS.

You can rebase to Kinoite XFCE version - see the forum thread here

Thanks for the hint. However, it seems that fedora-xfce is not available for F30.

No, it is as I am running it

Then I made a mistake.

$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase kinoite:fedora/30/x86_64/fedora-xfce4

error: No such branch 'fedora/30/x86_64/fedora-xfce4' in repository summary

I should have added that before I tried xfce without a 4 at the end, and got the same

error: No such branch 'fedora/30/x86_64/fedora-xfce' in repository summary

Try this

$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase kinoite:fedora/30/x86_64/xfce

Thanks, that worked.

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Congrats and fingers crossed!
I had run btrfs in high throughput server once, on stable up-to-date kernel. After few months, it crashed irrecoverably. Then I stopped using btrfs. Such issue never happened in the same setup with xfs.

I think that btrfs is ok for a personal laptop which of course is no high throughput server. For a production server I’m not sure if I would choose btrfs.

If zfs had a better license then I would have chosen zfs. But I remember that zfs on Linux was always a bit awkward. Don’t know if anything has improved here.

I’m curious. When did this happen that btrfs crashed? Which Linux, which version…?

Like two years ago, that time it was fully updated. I do not remember much, just that it was a VM running either Centos or Fedora.

When I decided to use btrfs it was because I didn’t use anything special (no raid etc.). I just wanted to have something far more flexible than lvm, and btrfs subvols additionally allow me to better utilize the disk space.

I hope that stratis will be usable in one or two years.

Hello there!
Speaking about BTRFS, can’t get Silberblue booted when installed on BTRFS subvolume (not volume). Any workaround possible?