Silverblue errata/caveats for daily use

Hi,

I’m considering replacing my Fedora Workstation instance with Silverblue and wonder if there are resources to help me understand the current state and if it’s ready for my daily use. What works and what doesn’t? What are the known limitations and workarounds? I’d rather not go to all this trouble just to learn that Silverblue is not usable for my needs.

Are there tips to backing up and restoring my home dir between installs or should I just use tar+gzip/rsync/whatever?

Thanks!
brian

It’s very subjective. You are the only one who can say if Silverblue is ready for your daily use. I suggest you install it in a virtual machine and make your own decision.

Check if the apps you use are already available as flatpak. If not, there are alternative solutions.
You may have to learn to use toolbox (or podman) for some command line stuff.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply!

With respect to

It’s very subjective. You are the only one who can say if Silverblue is ready for 
your daily use. I suggest you install it in a virtual machine and make your own
decision.

I agree that only I can decide if Silverblue is ready for me, making that decision shouldn’t necessarily require me to install it myself. There could exist notes/docs/errata to help inform my decision before I try to install it. Those notes are what I’m looking for with this post.

Thx,
brian

silverblue is a completely different distro from fedora workstation. The notes/errata don’t compare them. They are fundamentally different.

I will put some links below that might help you decide but here are my thoughts.

First, make sure you understand why you are switching to silverblue. You have to make sacrifices to do so make sure there are actual benefits that are valuable to you before switching. I have a long-term test laptop that I use for casual use. I install distros on their when I want to give them more than a casual test. I have never managed to keep silverblue on it for more than a month.

Some things to consider:

  • While most Linux software will run on silverblue, not all of it will
  • Many of the things you know about linux don’t apply to silverblue
  • Is all the software you use available as a flatpak?
  • For software that isn’t available as flatpak, you either need to run it in a toolbox, a podman container or install it as a layer. The layering approach can become something of a nightmare if you end up adding a lot of software that way.

Hi!

I can find many of that apps I need available on flathub, like LibreOffice and GnuCash. If software is available on flathub can I assume that it works the same as a native RPM? If not is there a good resource to understand the functional differences?

I’m unsure what to make of Google Chrome. That doesn’t seem available on flathub (although Chromium is) and based on this other post I’m unclear on the best path forward.

Thx,
brian

For the most part, you probably won’t notice the differences but it doesn’t work the same as an rpm at all.

This article is a basic summary mostly in plain language.

You probably would need to layer it in to the ostree if Chrome is a must-have piece of software for your needs. There are actually quite a few browsers that aren’t available as flatpaks.

Google Chrome is only on flathub-beta remote.
In fact the source has only the beta branch.