I been using Fedora Workstation for a while now and wanted to see what all the fuss was about on Fedora Silverblue. I installed it onto a spare laptop that I use for testing and for the most part everything seemed to be okay.
One thing I did have to do is layer a few packages using rpm-ostree - 11 to be precise and mostly audio codecs and GPU drivers.
For the most part, I never though much of it but then when I done a wee bit more research to see if Atomic desktop is for me I kept coming the same information that pretty much said to layer as little packages as possible due to various reasons.
That brings me to my question - is there a “recommended” limit to the number of layered packages?
The “don’t layer” thing is more for opinionated reasons that technical ones. The point of atomic distros is that you touch the base OS as little as possible. So package management is instead done through flatpak and containers.
In reality, Atomic distros handle installing packages to the base OS more safely and cleanly than traditional linux distros.
The only trouble I’ve had with layering is that dependency resolution is worse. Often times when upgrading to a new major version, the upgrade will fail citing dependency issues. But if this happens, it’s typically as simple as running “rpm-ostree reset”, upgrading, then readding all your desired layers.
As I do understand it is, when you use repositories others than from fedora/updates. If you can restrict your layers on them, while upgrading it should not be an issue.
This is highly subjective and more about ideology than anything else. Installing with rpm-ostree is supported. In short, it’s your system, so if you want to install things via rpm-ostree, then do it. There are some good reasons to, such as libvirt/vmware/vbox support for running virtual machines, etc. Some integrations don’t work well with flatpak, such as keepassxc and firefox, where the rpm versions work just fine without tweaking, etc. In short, do whatever works best for you regardless of what someone on the internet tells you (including me!).
I think the recommendation from the docs still applies:
Although Flatpak is best suited for GUI apps, Toolbox for CLI apps and package layering for system-level packages, it’s ultimately up to you to choose the method that best suits your needs. There’s nothing wrong in installing CLI apps with Flatpak, or GUI apps with Toolbox, or using package layering only.
