Upgrade from Fedora Workstation to Silverblue 30?

Project Discussion
1

In May 2018, you wrote:

We aim to make good progress on this project for Fedora 29 and plan to make Silverblue the preferred Workstation variant by Fedora 30.

Okay, that’s fine for new users when Silverblue 30 is released.

However, is there any plan/way to upgrade from Fedora Workstation to Silverblue? (either now or when v30 of each is released?)

2

There’s a guide describing how to convert an existing Workstation to Silverblue on the docs website: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation-dual-boot/ (though note I’ve just sent a patch with some tweaks in https://pagure.io/fedora-docs/silverblue/pull-request/38).

I’m not sure if something more automated is planned.

1 Like
3

The guide describes a side-by-side installation, which seems nice, but afterwards you still have the “old” Workstation around. So one would also have to get rid of that and transfer all data & settings to the Silverblue instance…

4

There is no direct upgrade path from traditional Fedora Workstation to Silverblue.

The previously stated goal of making Silverblue the default experience for F30 has not been met, so your best option is a fresh install of Silverblue.

5

You can do this… carefully. By doing rm -rf on the specific /sysroot directories that only matter to your system. And in /boot too to have it completely drop out of the boot menu. That said, I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re not familiar.

A safer route is e.g. copying your /var, /home, and /etc off your computer, installing Silverblue, and then restoring the bits you want (e.g. /home at least). You probably don’t want all of /var and /etc though since it’ll likely have settings & data for things that are not even installed anymore. But you could do it (and ostree admin config-diff will show you which files in /etc are superfluous or modified from the default).

6

Oh great. How I already like Silverblue… :wink:

Is not there any way to also export all installed programs (via dnf?) and then somehow import them via rpm-ostree?
Also, is the same possible for installed flatpaks?

Question is: Will it be, in the future?
Or are there even some plans to deprecate Fedora workstation in favor of Silverblue?

7

Those are big questions. :wink:

IMO, Silverblue has a lot of maturation to do before it can be the default Workstation choice for ALL users. Even when that future is achieved, I don’t think the traditional Workstation variant will ever be deprecated.

So the best thing to do is keep reporting issues, giving feedback, and helping test out changes to Silverblue. And eventually, it’ll become the default experience. :smile:

8

I think it’s tied in with the discussion about a long-term support Fedora. I’d favor drastically reducing the media produced to

  1. A long-term support DVD and net installer every two years with support for five, like Ubuntu LTS.
  2. A rolling release Silverblue desktop with all the major desktops available plus a huge container registry of Fedora-based images. This is probably what my workstation will look like once Silverblue acquires all the AMD and NVidia GPU drivers, except the containers will be mixed Fedora and non-Fedora where third parties don’t support Fedora, like RStudio Server.
  3. An enhanced Fedora Remix program - maybe a “Fedora Remix Store” - for everything else.
9

Yeah, I bit the side-by-side bullet yesterday - my workstation is now dual-booted F29 and Silverblue 29 in a common filesystem including my home directory. I’m probably going to convert the laptop to F29 today; I ran into a blocking issue in Arch with one of the R packages I use and said package works in Fedora. But I won’t be going with Silverblue even side-by-side until there are NVidia drivers in Silverblue.

10

Nope, don’t think so. This is totally off-topic.

Personally, I don’t think this is a good idea, because it goes contrary to one of the three principles of fedora: First – i.e. be the first to deliver things.

That said, coming back to this thread:

Then how comes, you previously easily stated that goal? :smile: