Because Silverblue is built from the Fedora packages if you stick to the released branches of Silverblue, it generally is very stable. And lots of us are using it day-to-day to get our work done.
But there are some real caveats: the first and most important one is that you canāt expect random search results about Fedora to be directly applicable without adaptation. So that makes it challenging for a newcomer to Fedora. You arenāt just dealing with a new operating system, you have to apply an extra layer of thinking to any information you find.
A second caveat is that the more you layer things on top of the base, and especially if you start overriding packages, the more there are potential failure modes when updating your operating system image. There have been some changes recently to improve things, but you can still get into states where manual intervention is needed. And when you are in such a state, GNOME Software is not useful - you need to drop to the command line.
If we look at broad areas of use:
Desktop end user tasks Can be accomplished by installing Flatpaks (often from Flathub.) Some amount of layering may be needed if you are using less common types of peripherals.
Developer tasks Work well inside Toolbox. IDEās in Flatpaks do not work with the exception of GNOME Builder and Visual Studio Code - installing in your home directory is workable for some other IDEs.
Containers Silverblue is very solid platform for doing things with containers, with the exception that podman doesnāt work inside Toolbox without adding a wrapper script.
Server tasks In general, if you want to use your workstation as a place to experiment with non-containerized servers, Silverblue is a bad choice. For one or two servers you can layer them on top of the base with ārpm-ostree installā, but if you do too much of this, see above about rpm-ostree failure modes.
What needs to improve to make Silverblue better? Thereās so that could be said, but a few top areas on our mind:
GNOME Software Performance and Reliability GNOME Software is the interface between the user and operating system and application updates. If it doesnāt feel absolutely solid and slick for Silverblue, then the user experience with what makes Silverblue different from classic Fedora will be poor. So far, it doesnāt feel solid and slick but weāre working on it!
Integration of Toolbox with the terminal We expect people who are using a terminal ln Silverblue to be doing most of their work in Toolbox, but we donāt make it easy, or clear whatās going on, especially when using multiple toolboxes.
Out of the box software availability We need to make sure that the software people need is easy to install. For Fedora 35, we will have a filtered subset of Flathub available by default (Issue #108: Add selected Flathub apps to the third-party repos - fedora-workstation - Pagure.io).
Documentation Fedora Silverblue User Guide :: Fedora Docs is very basic, and doesnāt really solve the question about āhow to do X on Silverblueā.
We often think about work in terms of items that benefit both Silverblue and Fedora Workstation - we believe that installing applications as Flatpaks and doing development in a Toolbox container decoupled from the host system are very useful, whether your base image is managed by rpm-ostree or as loose RPMs.
High level answer: if you are already an intermediate user, Silverblue is absolutely ready for day-to-day use. Thereās a learning curve that makes it unsuitable for beginners, but once you get the hang of it, it wonāt get in your way. āproduction useā would, to me, mean putting it into the hands of people who donāt care about how operating systems work. Itās definitely not ready for that.
