Thoughts on Silverblue

Hi Fedora Community,

I’m fairly new to Linux and I’ve recently jumped in to Silverblue 30 as my daily driver and it has been a pleasant experience so far.

I was able to setup my web development tools pretty easily (with podman replacing docker).
Flatpak apps also works seamlessly with the exception for code editors/IDE’s which needs to use some of the host’s binaries. Though using ‘flatpak-spawn’ does the trick for me, it would be great if this limitation is addressed (If it is already addressed, please enlighten me :slight_smile:).

I also encountered an issue with Flatpak where some newly installed app (from Flathub) does not open unless I logout and login back.

I also had another issue when it comes to updates. I have already disabled the automatic updates in Gnome Software but It seems that updates are still being automatically downloaded in the background whenever I boot up. I see “Transaction: upgrade (download only)” from ‘rpm-ostree status’. I know I can do rpm-ostree cancel but it would be great if I can turn it off completely.

Nonetheless, Silverblue has been great as my daily driver.
I really do think that this is the future of Linux Desktop :slight_smile: because it is “Beginner Friendly” in my opinion.
Looking forward to more sweet features in the future!

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Unfortunately there probably will never be a perfect solution to this… What I want to do is write a VS Code extension that will have options to automatically set some of this stuff up.

I’ve seen some other comments about this, it’s a bit odd… Does it happen if you install via system or user installs, or both?

Hmm this should be controlled by Software, have you rebooted since you last disabled it?

Great to have you here!

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If you are using a metered connection, you might also want to restrict background downloads in the network configuration.

As per the result from flatpak list, my apps are installed as ‘system’. I always use the Gnome Software Center when I install flatpak apps.

I have rebooted a number of times since a disabled it. At least flatpak apps are not updating automatically.

Thanks for this! However, the system still downloaded in the background after I turned this on. Maybe it needs a reboot to take effect. I will observe if it will reoccur again.

Well I guess gnome software does not respect this setting yet. I searched the settings UI and there was no setting to disable background download of ostree updates, although I did find a manual check for updates button under the details settings panel. That would be a good place to add some settings for ostree to disable the background downloads and set frequency of update checks. I looked in the man page for rpm-ostree and ostree, but there was no mention of how to disable background downloads there either.

EDIT: I found the information in the rpm-ostreed.conf man page. Type man rpm-ostreed.conf in terminal to show settings options.

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Thanks again for this! As per the manual, AutomaticUpdatePolicy defaults to none which should disable automatic updates. Anyway, I’ve followed the instructions in the manual to set this option to check so that rpm-ostree will download only the metadata. Hopefully, this solves the issue.

Just to weigh in on my solution to the VS Code flatpak problem for others reading this. Currently I have it set up where I set up Workspaces for my projects and set the ShellArgs setting in the VS Code workspace settings to run a command to enter the proper toolbox automatically (basically "-c", "flatpak-spawn --host toolbox enter -c <projectname>" as the value in the json file). Perhaps a script/vs-code extension could be written to automatically generate toolboxes and workstations with these options set.

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I ended up writing a script for this. Here it is if you want to check it out. There’s definitely improvements to be made to this. https://github.com/leggettc18/sb-project-setup