Hi, I’m new to Fedora (and Linux in general). I would like to move from Workstation to Silverblue but first I want to know if there is an easy way to reinstall all the applications and extensions I already installed, and also to if is possible to get the configurations settings of everything (apps/system) to reload them later in the new system.
My idea is to delete everything to start on an empty drive with a clean install and then reinstall again all the apps/extensions/settings, but I don’t know if it’s possible to have some kind of “backup” (similar to Time Machine on MacOS) or if I have to do it manually…
Specific to Silverblue (and Fedora atomic desktops in general) is the fact that GUI apps are generally installed as Flatpaks. One of the specifics is that Flatpak config files are located under ~/.var/app/<put-flatpak-app-id-here>.
So I would back up the home folder, install Silverblue, then install all the needed apps, and afterwards copy configs on a per-app basis.
Or you can even try to restore the home folder contents from the backup after having installed Silverblue, and them move the config files where needed. I would do that on a test user first, as to keep my initial user clean in case it doesn’t work as expected.
Before getting into the details, is there any particular reason you want to move from Workstation to Silverblue?
I’m asking because if you’re new to Linux in general, an immutable desktop adds a few concepts and a bit of extra complexity. It has some really nice advantages, but you’ll need to get familiar with things like layering, Toolbx/toolboxes, Flatpak, and the distinction between the host system and your environment. The Getting Started documentation is also pretty much mandatory reading.
If there’s no specific reason for switching yet, I’d probably stick with Workstation for now and try Silverblue in a Virtual Machine. That way you can get familiar with the model without making the base system more complicated than it needs to be.
As for the actual migration: there isn’t a 1:1 Workstation → Silverblue migration process. Reproducing an existing Workstation setup would likely mean using something like Ansible for your configuration, or building your own bootable image with your customizations. If you are still curious, you can check the work from the Ublue peeps.
That’s definitely doable, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a first step into Linux or Silverblue. I’d use Workstation as your base, play with Silverblue in a VM for a while, and then consider the move once you’re comfortable with how the immutable model works.
My reason to test Silverblue is basically because I’m very curious in trying things and testing scripts that I found in the web, mainly to understand how many things work. But doing that have broken some things on my system a couple of times yet. So I thought that maybe having an immutable system would make it easy to recover when shit happens…
That’s it. But I will take the recommendation to test it in a virtual machine first.
As Mike already wrote, apps are installed as flatpaks with their settings folders in your home folder. But you can go one step further, that’s also what I do, you can install the flatpak apps also in your home folder. Add Flathub as supplier for many apps this way:
The --user option makes sure you install the apps in your user home folder. Installing them also requires the --user option so you get something like this:
flatpak --user install flathub brave -y
In short, you now have the apps and the settings folders in your home disk (partition) and with a re-install, or whatever you want to change, you can keep the home disk with all apps and settings.