My thoughts on Fedora IoT (Immutable Fedora server)

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A while back I moved to Fedora Silverblue from regular Fedora. It has been a surprisingly good experience and I like the fact that my system doesn’t get so cluttered. I pretty much exclusively use Flatpaks and Distrobox for software. If there is something that can not run in a container I just spin up a VM and install it. I like my system and it has been pretty solid.

My positive experience with Fedora Silverblue has lead me to look for something similar for a server. Fedora server is good but it is not immutable. The closest thing I could fine is Fedora IoT. It works pretty well as a server but it doesn’t have a lot installed and requires me to install Cockpit manually. While I don’t really mind doing this but it I am not really sure what the intended use case for Fedora IoT is really. If you look at the doc page you will see it seems to be targeted towards single board computers and other small devices but honestly I don’t see why those devices would need Fedora.

This post is getting long so I will wrap it up. I like Fedora Silverblue and I wish there was a server equivalent. Fedora IoT is kind of what I am looking for but the problem is that it is not server focused. I think there would be a lot of benefit to creating a dedicated immutable server spin. It should be very similar to Fedora server but it should be OS tree based.

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I use Silverblue on my laptops and Fedora IOT on a Raspberry PI “home server” on which I run various services in Podman Quadlets.

The actual server equivalent would be FCOS (Fedora CoreOS), though.

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Core OS is not quite what I am looking for. It is close but not quite the same. The big difference is that Core OS is deigned to be a easy OS to deploy containers on.

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I’m curious what your plan is for running services / applications on an immutable system if not containers.

Have you seen the bootc-initiative ?

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This is just me guessing, but I think the challenge is that we don’t have a good answer to running server workloads outside of containers like how flatpak answers that concern for GUI applications. In Fedora land if you want to use an atomic system and a flatpak doesn’t work, you realistically have to go to containers. Which to be honest is probably good from a cloud native mindset, but that takes potentially changing your mindset.