Kinoite, a KDE (and now XFCE) version of Fedora Silverblue

Hi Tim. Thanks for working on the updates. Going forward I think it would be good if more of the community helped out in maintaining these branches too. It would put less demand on your time and we have less bus factor risk. I agree that we need to be automating the builds too. I would like to see Kinoite become the KDE (et. al.) defacto alternative spin. Thanks for all the work you do, I really appreciate it.

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Thanks! I’ve pushed updates for F32 and Rawhide branches are back (with the usual caveats and the Pantheon branch missing).

I have just uploaded Fedora 33 branches! :tada: Be careful as those have just been branched from Rawhide and will contain bugs. But at the same time they are great for testing. As always, I will stop producing Rawhide branches for a while and will resume once Fedora 33 is released.

The Pantheon branch is currently failing to build due to BZ #1831478. Please help upstream if you want this spin to succeed!

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So the elementary-greeter package can’t install because of changing libmutter library name, is that right?

It’s more than just a name change. As mentioned in the ticket, there usually are API changes that requires changes in upstream projects. I don’t use Pantheon nor have the time to work on that so you will have to reach out to upstream.

Fedora 33 Beta is here and is now available for all variants in my repo as the Patheon variant is building again. As always be careful (make backups!) as I can not test every single variant, although I can now pretty much guarantee that the stable KDE variant works well as I uses it on my main laptop.

Happy beta testing! :tada:

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and unpinned all GNOME based deployments

I had to look up how to do that.
Based on Pinning Deployments in OSTree Based Systems — Project Atomic
I did: rpm-ostree status to see which one was the GNOPE,
and: sudo ostree admin pin --unpin 2 to unpin it.

Fedora 33 has been released :tada: and I have updated all variants with the latest packages. You can update with the following commands:

# Pin your current deployment (optional)
$ sudo ostree admin pin 0

# Rebase to the new version
$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase kinoite:fedora/33/x86_64/kinoite

Example instructions to rebase if you have enabled the rpm-fusion repository:

$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase kinoite:fedora/33/x86_64/kinoite \
      --uninstall rpmfusion-free-release-32-1.noarch \
      --uninstall rpmfusion-nonfree-release-32-1.noarch \
      --install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-33.noarch.rpm \
      --install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-33.noarch.rpm

As I made a mistake during the initial Fedora 33 build, you will probably get a warning message on the login screen about SDDM and wrong permissions for the KDE variant. This can be easily worked around (and should only be needed once) after the update by logging in via a TTY (use Ctrl + Alt + F2 for example) and using:

$ sudo chown sddm: -R /var/lib/sddm
$ sudo systemctl restart sddm

As always, this is the last Fedora 32 build that I will make as I focus on Fedora 33 and will resume Rawhide builds soon.

Enjoy!

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Thank you. Does your distro contains Gnome? Did you consider such combined deployment?

Kinoite does not have multiple desktop environments. If you would like to have multiple desktop environments, you can stay with official GNOME version and install other desktop environments using package layering.

See Kinoite, a KDE (and now XFCE) version of Fedora Silverblue - #153 by siosm for lists of packages to layer to get additional desktops on top of Silverblue.

Thanks, I already have that packages layered. Just thought Kinoite could add benefit of more quick upgrades etc.

Can’t start my containers:

[bam@host bam]$ toolbox enter 
Error: failed to start container fedora-toolbox-33

Hello @bam,
Try podman healthcheck run on the toolbox container.

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Looks like this is still happening with the latest build. Will take time to investigate soon but in the meantime the same steps should work here. This should only happen once after the update. Sorry for the issue.

Thanks I’ll try, just want to emphasize the same containers run perfectly on main Fedora SB 33.
Maybe just update of Kinoite base is needed? @siosm

Yeah I’m running toolbox on Silverblue F33 Gnome, have been since rawhide actually, and I can still use it and my F32 toolbox too.

I pushed an update today. Hope it will help.

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Hi, just wanted to say, thanks for providing a Pantheon variant here! I’m the maintainer of Pantheon on fedora, and it’s really cool to see what people can do with it :slight_smile:

There’s been constant interest in a Pantheon spin of fedora (especially an OSTree based system) - do you think it would be possible to provide an official fedora Silverblue+Pantheon spin based on your experience with Kinoite?

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Thanks for working on Pantheon packaging! I couldn’t do all of that without you.

I’m currently working on making the KDE variant official. I think it’s definitely possible to create an official Pantheon variant but it will need people to maintain it (i.e. I will not commit to do that). I will probably keep building other desktop variants once the KDE one becomes an official one but support will be minimal.

See also the work from @walters in pre-RFC: Rebasing Silverblue on CoreOS that should make it easier to build and maintain more variants.

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