What are the goals of Silverblue over the next 3 to 5 years?

Is the goal that Silverblue is used to explore and prove certain technologies, those are then folded into regular Fedora (workstation and server), then Silverblue itself ceases to exist?

Or, is the goal that Silverblue becomes a “first class” edition of Fedora (alongside workstation, server, and IoT), and continues to be developed…?

The Silverblue website does mention goals, but they maybe aren’t up to date:

The concrete goals of the Team Silverblue project are to provide excellent support for container-based workflows and make Silverblue the preferred variant of Fedora Workstation. We want to reach these goals by the time Fedora 30 is released.

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I think if you look at the two technologies (Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Silverblue) you will see their parallelism to the current Server and Workstation offerings. With of course the addition of atomic updates, sandboxed applications whether flatpak’d or containerized, layering onto the core image as necessary. I think the goal is to become Workstation, WRT Silverblue.

I have always had the feeling that Fedora is more focused towards developers even though Workstation is geared towards “general use” and this is sadly accentuated in Silverblue IMHO.

I think that whenever a group of individuals collectively decide to participate in open source projects in general you are going to get a large proportion of technically oriented contributors, especially when the project is first taking off. In the case of Fedora, I feel that it is founded in adopting new technology “First”, this implies heavy dev influence/participation to me merely taken on face value. I do have friends who are not developers who use Silverblue quite happily without issue, and have been for a couple of years now. So I don’t think it is any more developer focused than other distribution offerings (speaking of either Fedora or Fedora Silverblue). I do think that since Fedora offers a diverse range of packages which cover many different use case configurations, this invariably opens the door for less OOTB up and running cases and a need of user intervention for specific configuration requirements.

Its a good question. To a larger issue in 10 years time I think almost all desktops and servers are moving towards “Silverblue / Fedora IoT / RHEL Edge / CoreOS” models of atomic updates and layered packages.

MacOS is already leading the way with that model on desktop and well… iOS devices are basically already there…

Somewhat unrelated, but I think Fedora IoT should probably be renamed to Fedora Edge - since its not clear that the goal is really push into the embedded space…it seems more like a edge server project.

If you imagine a continuum with Fedora Server on one end (general purpose OS, ad-hoc managed) and CoreOS on the other (defined configuration, atomic updates, layered packages, etc)…then I think Silverblue / IoT fit in the middle somewhere.

The question is as you pointed out…will this “middle” just become the norm?

Silverblue is definitely targeted at the Desktop use case, whether it be for software development or general purpose app daily driver. Software development will require more of a focus on container use, where apps will mainly focus on Flatpaks. So these two container technologies will need usability improvements in the future to make Silverblue a nice platform to work on. I think one of the goals should be to work on polish for these container technologies as well as improvements for desktop UX for things like backups/snapshots and other system related tools.