Silverblue vs. Kinoite | Differences in Initial experience

Enter the toolbox with ‘toolbox enter’ and then run ‘sudo dnf install rpmfilename’. You can launch it from the toolbox command line. I don’t know if you can setup a menu entry to launch an app inside a toolbox container. Maybe someone else knows how to do that.

Hi, yes I think you can (likely) do that. It’s basically just a Gnome desktop launcher which is entirely like the desktop shortcut in Windows in functional use. So I checked and in Gnome Software there is something called Desktop Files Creator in Flatpak that does this task. It’s in develop section.
Also, for creating the toolbox container you can specify a name for it if you like so you can make it your “Pet” Blue Mail container. Just a question but why the proprietary mail app? Why not pick from one of the many readily available mail clients from Fedora Linux the distribution?

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The only two I can find are Geary and Thunderbird. Geary doesn’t work very well - it has trouble getting mail from Outlook.com. Thunderbird works, but I dont love the UI.

I’ll try setting up the Toolbox and using Desktop Files Creator. If it all goes south, how do I delete the Toolbox?

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Have you enabled the flathub repo? It has Evolution, Claws-Mail, DavMail, among others. DavMail is good with exchange servers apparently. I have used and still use Evolution, it has no issue with Exchange servers either.
[Edit] You can enable the repo at the command line with flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

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How would I enable that repo?

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It’s very possible you enabled the 3rd party repos when you completed the install,

You can check the software center that you enabled 3rd party repos

You can scroll up to the top of this thread and see where to find the Software Repos that are enabled

Fedora has some good documentation about toolbox here Toolbox :: Fedora Docs

Oh, yeah. I definitely did that.

So I checked and in Gnome Software there is something called Desktop Files Creator in Flatpak that does this task. It’s in develop section.

I tried Desktop Files Creator to make a desktop launcher for my STM32CubeIDE app installed in my toolbox and it worked great! Thanks for the tip on that app.

Today brings the end of our current User Experience bringing in a total of 750 people. I posted this on the Fedora forums to bring attention to the most notable things within the scope of a New User coming to Fedora and Linux in general.

Clear across the board the most painstaking issues about the User experience was Software Discoverability, the use of the Software Center and the and the overall feel for New Users with 2 distinct desktop experiences.

Fedora Silverblue 35

Users found search in Gnome’s Software Center “cumbersome”, “clunky” and “non-functional” in the most severe cases. Users having to type, re-type and slowly type software names made was expressed in these traits and caused frustration. Unfortunately, the most painstainking point for most users (some went into detail as to why…) was, as we have noted, The Third party Repo Option, it’s availability in Software Center, and the fahion in which Fedora “curated” the software afterwards, causing the Users time and confusion.

Some Users expressed interest into why only 7 apps (Skype, Discord, MS Teams, Minecraft, bitwarden, Postman, Zoom) and the choice of these 6 specifically considering Fedora’s approach to Open Source Software and available alternatives ( Mattermost, Wire, Elements, Jitsi, KeepassXC)

New Users typically interact more with GUI’s, it’s understandable and the experience should continue to improve on Gnome, The Third Party Repo option needs someone to strongly consider it’s purpose. It causes needless headaches and adding the same repo they’ve already enabled. Nvidia drivers are nearly a must for useability for those who need them.

@mattdm If there are any contacts or resources for us to reach out to We Would Like To Help ! !
I feel that the data we have accumulated throughout the User Experience can be beneficial to the for future versions of Silverblue and Gnome Desktop as a whole.


Fedora Kinoite 35

Honestly there was not much to say about Kinoite ! The experience reminded many of what a more modern Windows 7 desktop experience, Software searchability was straight forward since they were not prompted to add a Third Party Repo, they just added it themselves. Many said it was a more polished experience but would go with whatever the company decided.

Thumbs up for Fedora Kinoite. @siosm

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This is really awesome and valuable. There’s actually a Red Hat (internal) desktop team meeting next week that I’ll be at, and I’ll bring this up. Do you have a more formal write-up / report?

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It’s something we would have to look into. There’s a lot of data specific to the companies & it’s employees, including prior software and potential replacements, software & hardware vendors. It’s honestly not something we had thought to share. It is possible we can share some data through graphs etc, but we would like to run it by all the parties involved and of course anonymize any private data we collected.

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Thanks for the great feedback here!

The short answer for Kinoite is that this is our first stable release thus we are aware there are some usability issues (easier Flathub / Third Party repo support in Discover, rpm-ostree support in Discover) and are working on it.

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Invaluable feedback, thanks a lot! One year latter, did that lead to fixes and enhancements?

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We now have rpm-ostree support in Discover (Rpm-ostree support in KDE Discover - #13 by siosm - Fedora Discussion) and Flathub should be easier to install in Discover too.

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