Silverblue for desktops and servers?

therock892 · May 11, 2020, 6:37am

I wanted to try switching to silverblue (currently I use standard fedora and ubuntu lts).

I only had some doubts as to how to proceed with the installation of printer drivers (rpm format) so I think using rpm-ostree?

While to install some software like mariadb and vpn server (I currently use openvpn) should I always proceed with ostree or create a toolbox?

I was willing to try silverblue on 3 computers (laptop, a desktop and possibly on the server) … as long as it is recommended to use it also on the server!

returntrip · May 11, 2020, 10:49am

Hi therock892 and welcome to the forum!

Which printer are you trying to install? In my experience, the HP printer drives were already in the base image.

Silverblue is a desktop Linux OS and not ideal or recommended for Server usage (perhaps you could have a look at Fedora CoreOS if you plan to work with containerized servers: https://getfedora.org/coreos/)

However, with regards to using mariadb and the openvpn server, you could try to use them in Silverblue via containers run in podman.

joefidler · May 12, 2020, 1:47am

Something to consider for older baremetal installs - CoreOS requires 3G minimum of RAM. Silverblue has a smaller requirement and if you use something like Joe’s Window Manager or Sway it actually runs with overhead to spare - leaving room for example for a containerized app to run (I am still testing that bit out).

evenreven · May 12, 2020, 4:57am

Yeah, Silverblue is not really a server os. For one thing, it includes a lot of desktop gui applications you probably won’t need. There are use cases where it could be viable - like this: https://fedoramagazine.org/convert-your-fedora-silverblue-to-htpc-with-kodi/ - but it’s generally not really a good idea.

therock892 · May 12, 2020, 5:41am

Thank you all for the answers!

@returntrip my printer is an Epson Wf-2630 and a Brother Ql-550

I expressed myself badly regarding the server, I explain better, my “server” is actually a small corporate server in which run ruby on rails applications written by me and a java application, besides vpn server and mariadb.

At the same time the “server” also uses it as a desktop computer with office and graphics applications (inkscape and gimp)

I really liked the idea of an indestructible system that is quick to restore with a roolback in case of problems!

evenreven · May 12, 2020, 5:49pm

Then Silverblue is probably a good fit. I do Rails development on Silverblue, and it’s my favourite development OS. I create a toolbox for a project, and have a separate podman container for the postgresql db. Tidy, quite simple, and faster than my old setup, which used VMs.

roc1nante270 · May 14, 2020, 10:59pm

I’m a regular desktop user and I find Silverblue to be perfect for my needs.
I especially like that it’s leaner and faster than regular Workstation on my laptop, it’s more secure, ostree gives a perfect backup ability and flatpaks are awesome!

JohnMH · May 15, 2020, 12:25am

Sorry, how exactly is Silverblue “more secure”? Flatpacks, by definition, are
not secure. They’re updated individually, instead of following security
updates of the host system. They’re basically containers. That they use bwrap
doesn’t make them more secure, especially when most don’t actually have
policies, instead allowing all permissions.

roc1nante270 · May 15, 2020, 12:44am

More secure as your /root is read-only which can prevent some malware to gain access on crucial parts of your system. It also means your OS is more robust and you need to try harder to destroy it (the chance of doing it accidentally is now smaller). And you get a perfect backup utility with the ostree.

Regarding flatpaks; the idea is that they will be maintained and updated by the app developers themselves which gives us (in theory) faster updates. This also takes the burden of the small distro devs that need to maintain a lot of packages… Some distros have fast security updates and some don’t - with flatpaks everyone should have the same.

Some apps have policies and some don’t. But I believe it will get only better. Also, sandbox in any form is better than none. If you look closely to Flatpak documents and their website, they don’t say that it’s a secure way of distributing apps. Only that it can be safe.

evenreven · May 15, 2020, 5:19am

@JohnMH Can you please just stop following the Silverblue subforum? You’re polluting nearly every discussion with your FUD about flatpak and it’s getting tiresome. We get it, you prefer rpm, but dnf isn’t even available in Silverblue, so it’s way off topic. You don’t have to answer every post just because it arrives in your email, you know?

therock892 · May 18, 2020, 12:02pm

Is there anyone who can help me to be able to use my Brother labeller? Previously I had installed Ubuntu 20.04 and it installed the Brother driver and worked without doing anything.

I tried to install the drivers for Brother ql-550, downloading the drivers from the Brother website I installed the drivers with rpm-ostree.
The drivers seem correctly installed but when I try to launch a print eg with glabels to print a label nothing is printed.

Cups
Description: Brother QL-550
Location: Portatile-di-…
Driver: Brother QL-550 CUPS v1.1 (grayscale)
Connection: usb://Brother/QL-550?serial=H7G…
Defaults: job-sheets=none, none media=custom_28.96x89.83mm_28.96x89.83mm sides=one-sided

Cups log
completed at
lun 18 mag 2020, 11:04:57
“Use “pdftops-renderer” option (see README file) to use Ghostscript or MuPDF for the PDF -> PostScript conversion.”

I attach screenshots of the printer settings of the driver in use, after the installation of the brother driver