Silverblue as official Fedora edition

Currently Silverblue specific bugs are not blockers for release. It would be nice if Fedora Silverblue would be official edition and being tested as part of the release and bugs found on it would be taken as blockers.

Is there any plan to make Silverblue official Fedora edition?

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I don’t think I’m ready to jump unless it solves most of the use cases a fedora Workstation user might have. To cite an example, I think the DKMS management in rpm-ostree is still an open bug.

It would be nice to have a list of bugs that are actually blocking the Silverblue to become official Fedora edition.

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I would like to use Silverblue but have these issues:

  • I use “Paperwork” to archive and OCR my documents. But as Flatpak “Paperwork” does not recognize the Brother scanner.
  • I use Tilix since years. Flatpak regularly crashes and causes issues with toolbox
  • rpm-ostree upgrade is really slow.

So these are my no-go’s

I’ve read many times that certain apps cause issues or are unavailable as flatpaks. This is true. I just think it’s important to remember that those few programs are easily installed as rpms on Silverblue. The fact that X and Y apps (but no more than 10% of my GUI apps) do not work properly as flatpaks by no means stops me from enjoying the overwhelming benefits offered by Silverblue.

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@zlopez ,
Do you think there is only issues? I mean, there seems to be a large portion of people in the community who haven’t yet embraced that paradigm shift of being a dedicated Silverblue user. Don’t get me wrong. I am +1 on the idea and a bit disappointed that IoT made it into official status before Silverblue. Perhaps we should make an effort to bring @otaylor and @tpopela into the conversation. Would either of you be inclined to comment? I feel that after using Fedora Linux Silverblue since it was first renamed from Project Atomic, F27, it is very stable and has a fairly broad user base.

I’m using the Silverblue till F28 as well on my main work machine and I agree that there are workflows where the Silverblue isn’t a good choice. I’m not saying that Silverblue should replace workstation or any other Fedora edition, but rather add another choice as official tested edition of Fedora.

100% Agree with that statement. In fact I would like to see some spins get there too, I thought originally it was an intended route for “new” official editions.

1 Like

I am using Fedora Kinoite for 1 month.
These are my annoying list that I would like if it gets fix in near future.

  1. Toolbox images share same home with host home. This makes using the distro difficult. I understand that it’s convinient. But it would work if all we can use is one image.
    Let’s say I install rust, nvm, pipx inside toolbox. Those files will be available on host terminal. And similarly if I install same packages in another toolbox image. These files gets conflicted. Even if I delete toolbox these files doesn’t get deleted.
    It would be much better if toolbox has seperate home folder. At least there should be an option.
    issue

  2. Either include multimedia codecs. Or don’t include Firefox browser at all. Include different generic Gnome Browser or Konqurer browser. If I install Firefox from flathub there would be two firefox in my system. Since, Firefox from Fedora is useless for daily usage. I don’t like the idea of rpm-ostree remove. Feels like installing another browser using Internet explorer. lol.

At 1.: I’m pretty happy that I don’t need to link the home to toolbox container manually, but I see how this can cause issue in some cases. The argument to provide to toolbox create would be a nice solution of this.

At 2.: I’m using Brave, which was recently moved to stable on Flathub, but I agree that the default Firefox is just to install another browser after installation if it doesn’t have codecs in it.

At 1.: You could try Distrobox and see if it is a better fit for you than Toolbox. It can do “distrobox create --home ...”. I have used Distrobox successfully with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. With the upcoming release of Fedora 36 I will also try it with Silverblue.

The Cisco h264 is included by default, so the codecs should get downloaded and enabled shortly after the first launch (this is standard Firefox behavior). Similarly, widevine bits can be activated by enabling DRM (there’s usually a pop up in Firefox asking about this, but it’s in the regular settings). I’m not aware of the flatpak version doing something different, though the RPM packaging seems to get more frequent updates (and testing).

One big caveat that has nothing to do with Silverblue is that many of the media features, including h264 support, are currently missing in aarch64 for Firefox, so if you’re running on a raspberry pi 4, etc., you’ll definitely want to add ffmpeg, etc, via rpm-ostree from RPMFusion. That is not Fedora’s fault, but rather an issue upstream with Firefox.

What doesn’t work with the included FF in Kinoite? I’ve been using Youtube so far with no issues.

twitter videos don’t play. unless you install “ffmpeg-libs” package.

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Right. I am using distrobox for 1 week now. it’s superior than toolbox. I can have seperate home now.

With distrobox is it like a seamless chroot (do you get full device access, etc?) Any caveats? Sounds amazing! I’ll have to check that out.

Thank you for the tip. I will try Distrobox.