Hi, on my blog, I posted a report of my experience with Fedora Silverblue. Thanks to everyone in the community who helped me with the technical issues and everything
“My Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was getting a bit rusty (and it refuses to upgrade to a new release), so I was looking for a new distro for some time. I had already used Debian and Fedora in the past and was considering giving OpenSUSE a try. When I was asking for opinions on OpenSUSE, several friends came up with different suggestions and one of them said that if I wanted something “out there”, I should try Fedora Silverblue.”
Looks great! Some stuff you might find interesting:
I never found out what my system was busy with, but when I tried again a few minutes later, the error was gone.
rpm-ostree automatically downloads new metadata in the background, which you can see with an rpm-ostree status. If you want to do something without waiting for that to finish, run rpm-ostree cancel.
Why the vim flatpak maps the home directory onto the container correctly, but not the rest of the filesystem, I never found out. In the end, I ditched vim-as-a-flatpak, and installed vim as a layered package.
This is simply because Flatpak has its own rootfs, and inside things are expected to be laid out in a certain way. Outside of /home, other host directories should be in /run/host/, e.g. your host /etc is under /run/host/etc.
Unfortunately the VirtualBox package didn’t play nice with my read-only filesystem.
Another note: AFAIK the VirtualBox package doesn’t build on Silverblue, not sure if the recent akmods changes would fix that.
If you’ve used Chrome on Linux
As a side note, you seem to be doing well with Chromium, but if you wanted vanilla Chrome, I created a not-really-a-Flatpak wrapper, which basically appears as a Flatpak but actually runs Chrome on the host, which is what I’m using for now until I can get a true Chrome Flatpak (which I am working on, it’s just kinda messy).
Glad you tried Silverblue. I read your blog about it and hope to see more there on your daily use. I found, when working with VM’s recently, that I could get VirtualBox to build, but not run without errors as a layered package. WRT Virt-Manager and Gnome Boxes, Boxes is really meant for the end user and Virt-Manager is really meant for more granular control of your VM, so more for the admin. The OS, being rpm-ostree actually is intended to be able to layer the packages you can’t get as a flatpak, and more particular those packages that require beyond sandboxed environ’s to work in. It uses the backend of dnf to accomplish this. There is also the fedora-toolbox pet container which you can layer onto your base rpm-ostree image. When you’re installing multiple packages as layered onto the rpm-ostree, try to issue the install command with all of them on the one command, like rpm-ostree install zsh vim-enhanced stow to install zsh shell, vim and stow as an example. That way one reboot for three layered packages instead of three reboots.
As a side note, you seem to be doing well with Chromium, but if you wanted vanilla Chrome, I created a not-really-a-Flatpak wrapper , which basically appears as a Flatpak but actually runs Chrome on the host, which is what I’m using for now until I can get a true Chrome Flatpak (which I am working on, it’s just kinda messy).
I started using your Chrome Flatpak and I like it! I will edit the blog post to link to it. Is the “real” Flatpak you’re working on your private project, or are you collaborating with upstream?
Glad you tried Silverblue. I read your blog about it and hope to see more there on your daily use.
Hopefully nothing breaks anymore and so there will be nothing to write about
WRT Virt-Manager and Gnome Boxes, Boxes is really meant for the end user and Virt-Manager is really meant for more granular control of your VM, so more for the admin.
If by “upstream” your mean Chromium itself, then yeah it’s a private project. Ideally I’d be able to upstream some stuff, but my system isn’t exactly capable of building Chromium right now
