Hi, I helped create “Fedora CoreOS” and “Fedora Silverblue”. Of lately something I’ve noticed is that very often in communication, people will just say “CoreOS” or “Silverblue”.
There are two reasons I think for this. First, at a practical level when typing, people are going to be lazy. It’s the same reason “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” cannot escape the unofficial acronym “RHEL”.
But the second is, I think some people are under the impression that these things are sufficiently different (than “traditional Fedora”) to warrant emphasis via the “edition descriptor”.
I have come to believe this is more harmful than helpful. Personally, I am here to effect long term, lasting improvements in FOSS, and some of the technical things happening in those spaces are important - automatic transactional upgrades, a focus on containerization, and reprovisionability etc.
But in the end, I believe these are also changes that we want to have happen in “Fedora” in general.
Hence, over time I’d like to wind down the use of the term “Silverblue”. First, it’s very often clear from context whether one is talking about “desktop Fedora” or “server Fedora”. Instead of “I’m using Fedora Silverblue” one would say “I’m using Fedora Workstation (image mode)” perhaps. But actually - why even have the qualifier unless it is actually relevant to the conversation?
I’ve also seen people somehow think that using containers requires CoreOS/Silverblue. This is something we should push back on. For long time “traditional” Fedora users, I think it’s much easier to yum -y install podman flatpak toolbox && yum -y remove gcc firefox and tip one’s toes in the water that way.
Related to “CoreOS” - among other things, using the bare term can lead to much confusion because there is also “RHEL CoreOS”. We have a FAQ entry for this.
Anyways, my short term plea is: Let’s try to collectively stop using e.g. “CoreOS” and “Silverblue” as a standalone identifier. I know people want something short to type, so I’d propose acronyms: e.g. “FCOS” and “FSB34”.
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