Hello, guys.
I´ve seen numerous discussions about not layering packages until absolutely neccesary and keeping base system as clean as possible. All of this comes with Toolbx as a suggested solution to any problem. But that´s offtopic.
What about using Brew? How anti-atomic is that? (brew seeems to not mess with base system much)
To answer such questions I usually link to Fedora Atomic’s docs page.
Excerpt:
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. Nevertheless, our examples stick to the aforementioned recommendations throughout this documentation.
There’s nothing wrong with package layering. However, I tend to only layer packages that are not avaialable as Flatpaks.
My view is different with Toolbx though. It’s probably a good development and testing environment, but I don’t consider it as a solid solution to install CLI apps for long-term usage. Upgrading Toolbx containers is not officially supported, even if technically possible. This means that you have a “static” environment, and would need to recreate your environment with every new Fedora release, if one wants to stay up-to-date.
What are your exact needs for package layering?
Homebrew is the official method to install CLI apps on Fedora’s downstream projects that are part of the Universal Blue family.
I-Hate-Discours-and-Creating-Accounts Just-Let-Me-Use-A-Mailing-List
just-let-me-ask-a-question
You can have the Mailing list feeling reading the topic like (see link below):
Yeah, I have similar feelings about Toolbx. I haven´t fully understood even the developement usecases and why it does not provide any reasonable way to not share $HOME. But whatever.
My needs are mostly CLI apps (sometimes there are a lot of them). And sometimes some stupid experiments that sometimes break things (recently tried out Niri and for the first time used rollback to get out of created mess)
Layering takes quite a time, and, without --apply-live, a reboot. While I haven´t yet needed to do a major upgrade, I´ve read rather a lot of comments that layered packages significantly slow down upgrading. Not big of a problem since upgrading is a very rare thing.
Brew often outpaces fedora packages in versions and amount of available software. + there isn´t yet a good way to use COPR repos on atomic distros. So, I was just curious if using Brew aligns with the idea of atomic distros.
Thanks.
But I was more pissed off (can I say stuff like this here?) about the fact that I need to (1) register and (2) use a pretty damn clumsy forum to just ask a question. Not about the look of Discouse: Discouse provides quite good and lite no-js version of site. But with JS enabled though…
Off-topic but if you don’t like Discoruse why not use the community support Mailing List instead: Making sure you're not a bot!
I’d say it depends on the use case. If you need to install/remove CLI packages on a daily basis, then layering on top of the base image could become annoying. But for such a setup installing in containers could be rather suitable.
If, on the other hand, the use case is to initially install whatever packages needed to have a functional desktop, and then only occasionally install/remove packages, then atomic desktops are really a great solution. It doesn’t really matter how log it takes to create new deployments, as with automatic updates on all the updates take place seamlessly in the background, and the user gets on the updated system after each occasional reboot.
From my experience this is not the case, but it certainly depends on the amount of layered packages and their dependencies (and the hardware, of course). But then again, it only matters when actively changing the local image (via package installations/removals, with the user wanting to reboot into the new deployment asap), but not for regular updates.
I haven’t seen Homebrew being oficially supported by Fedora, but as mentioned, downstream projects using bootc are proposing it.
We’ll probably see some changes once Fedora switches from RPM-Ostree to bootc, but others more actively involved in Fedora Atomic are more suited to share more details.
You can also join the Fedora Atomic Matrix room: #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org (or #silverblue:fedoraproject.org for Silverblue-specific topics), if such communication channels are more suitable to you.
Thanks for explaining things up for me. Appreciate your effort.
(matrix is among top-15 worst things that happened to humanity 
).
I actually missed an existing “users” mailing list, thanks to @boniboyblue for pointing it out.