#1

Hi, I’m Nick, my first question is a really general question, sorry!
I installed Silverblue because I think the immutable OS can save me from sysadmin headaches. But I have no idea why other people like it, or even if anyone else likes it.

If you’re using Silverblue, why did you pick it?

I installed Silverblue 31 a week ago because I like the immutable idea. I’m using it for virtual machines, and I’ve been getting nerdy and drilling down into the rpm-ostree/libostree/toolbox setup. Now it’s occurred to me I don’t know the big picture.

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2020: The Year in Review
#2

Yeah, I also like the OS being immutable and the integration with (toolbox/podman) containers and Flatpak.

The fact that you can pin deployments is really cool (I have Silverblue 30/31/32 beta available on my grub entries).

You want rawhide? No problem, it is a rebase away.

Feeling like having KDE, XFCE or a more basic system? Sure, rebase via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/kinoite-a-kde-and-now-xfce-version-of-fedora-silverblue/.

I mean, Silverblue is relatively new and can feel unpolished for some people, but for me is great!

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#3

I love Fedora and want to contribute back to the community. Testing Silverblue by using it daily is one way of doing it for me; using Silverblue feels like being a part of something that’s going to be great in the future (immutable OS ftw).

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#4

A bit weird, maybe, since this is still early stages of both Silverblue and the Podman (including Toolbox) ecosystem, but system stability and low maintenance overhead is essential to me. I use my computer for 50% development work and 50% browsing/writing. I don’t want to have hundreds of rpms (or debs or pacman packages) installed as root, copr repos and whatnot and open the door to dependency hell. I want to install simple cli tools (say, from pre-built binaries) that I put in .local/bin (or using pip --user for python and rbenv for ruby) and other stuff I put in a container, either Toolbox (more complex stuff that requires interaction) or Podman proper (simpler stuff).

I felt vindicated in my choice recently when Silverblue saved me and my employer a couple of hours or work recreating a dev environment or looking for the broken updated package: Toolbox broken again (crun update in 31.20191112.0) Instead I just used the rollback feature and waited a few days.

#5

Some of my friends that use other distros asked me why do I use Silverblue when I can have Arch/Ubuntu/Debian + Timeshift + btrfs… well, why would I complicate things? Silverblue has the rollback superpower built in and it’s the only backup I need.
Other than that, I really love the concept of immutable OS - I consider it to be the future of Linux OS on desktop as well as on mobile.

More secure, more stable, easy to rollback or rebase - just easy and functional. Also, toolbox is really useful :wink:
Fedora has a bright future, mark my words…

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#6

I like Silverblue because I think it is contributing to how the desktop should be in the future. I actually don’t use the toolbox that much but I appreciate the immutable root as a security freak. If you do use toolbox, it’s a very nice way to containerize development.

I also really like how Flatpaks are usually sandboxed and still have the necessary system integrations. They have come a long way, I’d say I generally have no issues at all anymore with Flatpaks whereas there used to be more little bugs and glitches.

Stick with Silverblue. It is going to age very well as Wayland, Flatpak, and Pipewire develop together. It is an operating of the future.

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#7

I like the idea of containerized applications. I work with LaTeX and Jupyter Lab, which together need hundreds of packages installed to work properly. The next step is to commit the image to make it portable (just in a USB stick). I am a bit confused at this point because I need to read over the docs. I was a complete novice in computing one year back and this concept of OS is good for learning to speak face to face with the computer, so to speak. A straight effect is that my laptop seems to work much better.

A drawback?: I had lots of problems unsuccessfully trying to install Mayavi and VisIT for 3D visualization. Two docker images don’t work (fail to import mayavi.mlab, but not mayavi) because it doesn’t read the X server. I guess that I should install first the Nvidia drivers, but in any case I miss clearer instructions.

#8

For me, because my needs have changed somewhat…Maybe because I’m older and more cautious, who knows?
Always used to want bleeding edge, and while I never managed to break my system irreparably under Arch (and later Manjaro) I’ve had to fix it a few times here and there.
I came to a realisation lately that my use case these days is pretty much just browsing + email, music production and some youtube video on occasion, (occasionally a twitch stream)
Any gaming I do is on a headless windows box (accessed via parsec)
All of this works fine in Silverblue and if I really want to play a Linux native game, or use Wine/proton, those also work.
May as well have a more stable system in this case…also, my inner tech-nerd couldn’t resist trying out a new distro for the first time in years…and my first Fedora distro ever…not counting Red Hat Linux 5.2 and older back int he day :smiley:
I’d also like to contribute here and there where I can, though I am no real coder.

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#9

Initially curiosity is what drew me to it (that and the name sounded super cool)

The two primary things I do on a computer are 1. Development and 2. Gaming. Initially I wanted to see how these worked out on a system that was immutable. So, I saw it as a sort of challenge. But then I rapidly (within the first few hours/days) fell in love.

Keeping a clean system while still being able to muck about is awesome. I can spin up a toolbox and play around with some new tooling with different versions and just dump the toolbox when I’m done with it. Though now days I mostly have 1 primary toolbox that I have a lot of stuff just piled into :laughing:

Gaming is simple with things like Steam and Itch.io, but some games require more libs or features like Wine. For these I can make custom launch scripts that just exec toolbox run wine someWineGame.exe or a native toolbox run someGame to use the libs inside my toolbox and somewhat containerize said games.

Development is also extremely simple. Since I mostly use Java I don’t really need the toolbox, since I can use java with all my local libs and such in a Java folder in my home directory. But I did finally put NetBeans in a toolbox in order to integrate with SceneBuilder (which is also in a toolbox).

Once I figured out a little how to use toolbox and then the rest of my normal applications (Fractal, Gedit, etc…) I just use as Flatpaks I really see no reason to not use Silverblue. I feel safe, and more confident when mucking about with programming, and I don’t feel like I’m cluttering up my system for an eventual reinstall.

It just feels right :slight_smile:

And hopefully once we can get the Fedora on Mobile (PinePhone, Librem5 etc…) more stable and in a better “final” state, we can start to make that into a similar immutable ostree system.

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#10

I use Silverblue because it is Great!

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#11

I vote also that. So great OS it is. Name is cool and if you are using Rawhide, what can be more James Bond? I am sure that if I still be dating girls will instantly fall my arms if they will hear what OS I am using. Windows is sooo nineties. Also going backwards easily when you end a mess. If I am right, have been using only half year and two times face situation where major disaster was avoided, where just rollback. And I believe that it will be the future. I heard also that Linus Torvalds is using Fedora in all her computers. And one of the reason for me is to going out from comfy zone to learn something new.

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#12

I think my story is probably similar to what other people might have: I came here from Arch, because I have terrible luck with software and every other update mesa would break. Sure, stuff still breaks from time to time, but the safety net of being able to just reboot into an old version is absolutely amazing.

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#13

Good day,

I have been using Ubuntu for a long time before switching to Silverblue. Updates in the linux world are not always clean and I was used to version update breaks each time I updated the box to a new version. I could use LTS, but no new software versions available. For some stuff, I also ended up installing lots of things that clutter the OS, and might be one of the issues with the always failed updates.
I tried Fedora Workstation too, and the update issue was still there. So I decided to test Silverblue, and since then I’m on it. Why? here:

  1. The OS updates independently of the Software
  2. The software updates when the devs of the software publish new releases
  3. The system is clean
  4. There is a rollback option if an update goes wrong (never used it yet though)
  5. Can declutter using toolbox, that is, I create a toolbox and install those things that I might need only for a short period of time there. When I delete the toolbox, those things are gone, and the system is still clean

There are issues still though. But they will be fixed sooner or later, I presume.
Regards,
RR

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#14

Not sure I can add much to what has already been said. I run Silverblue on my main work laptop - which was scary at first - but has ended up being an excellent choice. I get stability for my critical apps along with the ability to test and get familiar with (and cleanly remove) new stuff using flatpaks and tooboxes - without the clumsiness of using VMs.

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