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.

  • @laughterlaughter
    2•6 months ago

    What does rebasing mean in this context? I try to google it, but all I get is git rebase.

    Any articles about it that are worth reading? Or if you can explain, that would be neat. Thanks!

    • Caveman
      5•6 months ago

      It’s a command provided by the OS to distrotop between ublue distros. You can basically hop between silverblue, Kionite and Bazzite with a single command.

        • @[email protected]
          4•6 months ago

          ostree based distros*, the default fedora don’t use ostree so you can’t rebase, bazzite is not fedora but they also use ostree, so you rebase there

          • @laughterlaughter
            2•6 months ago

            I have so much to learn. Last time I was tracking distros and having fun with distro hopping was with Slackware 7, I think.

            What is ostree? What is bazzite? Time to google stuff.

    • boredsquirrel
      3•6 months ago

      Its the same :D

      Rebasing refers to an OSTree remote which is like a git repo, but with binaries and producing bootable systems. There are some differences there.

      The idea is: there is a remote that has the exact wanted configuration, your system mirrors it. All the package manager does is similar to git pull.

      If you rebase, you switch the upstream remote, and your system gets the diffs, downloads them.

      The cool thing is, that these updates are atomic, so you stay on the current system and the rebased one is only set as the system you boot in after a reboot. You can still sudo ostree admin pin 0 before rebasing, and your current system will be saved forever to switch back to.

      Note that /etc is writable so you might still accumulate duplicate or redundant configs.

      gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig/-/issues