So I took the plunge and installed Fedora Silverblue because of all that immutable buzz. And it’s the most frustrating change I have made in almost 20 years of my distrohopping.

After installing Silverblue I configured it as usual. I installed necessary flatpaks, played with toolbox and distrobox, installed codecs, configured my bluetooth keyboard and other stuff in /etc and /var. Applied some useful tweaks I found on the web and… well… everything works. Nothing to do anymore. No issues. Nothing breaks, no dependency hell, everything runs smooth. I have nothing to tweak, tinker or configure anymore. So frustrating.

Every update is just… meh. Smooth, new, fresh system not affected by my stupid tweaking and breaking. Booooring.

I don’t have to distrohop anymore. If I want other distros I can just install them in distrobox. Other versions of apps? Something from AUR perhaps…? No problem. What’s the point of distrohopping now? Other DEs? I just rebase my system to other images with almost any DE or WM I want without losing data or messing everything up (damn you, UBlue!).

I don’t even have to reinstall the damn thing cause every time I update the system or rebase it to another image it’s like reinstalling it.

Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.

  • macniel
    23•17 days ago

    Is this a First Linux-World Problem? :D

    To me, I like how clean and coherent GNOME looks like, but what I don’t like about it, is how hostile it is in regarding of themeing/coloring.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•17 days ago

          It is my understanding that a lot of thought and care is put into the design language and appearance of applications and frameworks. However the same level of consideration is not usually afforded to skins and themes, which are often released an never updated again. This can cause usability issues and sometimes even breakages. Of course, people are free to do as they please with their computers.

        • just another devEnglish
          5•17 days ago

          Yeah. My guess is that for every meticulously hand crafted ui, there’s 10 that just go with the default. If a user wants an icon pack where🤘means home, they’ll be perfectly fine with navigating your application.

          Developers can always include an option to disable styling if that would severely break the ui. But personally, I’d rather use a application that looks roughly like every other one in the system, than one that’s so specifically designed that it doesn’t.

      • macniel
        8•17 days ago

        Yeah I get the rational, and that DEs shouldn’t theme them apps but I want to have some sort of customization (not just an accent color).

      • Einar
        3•17 days ago

        Thank you. I feel like I’ve found a new way to respect developers that I hadn’t considered before.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•16 days ago

        I don’t support that some want to push their own theme. Just use the provided theme. You may create your own custom theme but that should be able to be used everywhere. App icons can be part of a theme.

      • macniel
        1•15 days ago

        Yeah I tried it, but sadly it didn’t really worked well in for example Geary.