Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love Fedora Atomic (Silverblue, Bazzite, Kinoite, Aurora, IOT, etc.), more than any other distro I used, and I plant to continue using it.

It never made any problems on any of my devices, and because it is pretty much indestructible and self-managing, I even planned to install it on my Mum’s new laptop, in case her current one (basically a toaster with Mint on it) breaks.

But with the last days, my trust is damaged quite a bit.

First one, where I couldn’t update anymore on uBlue, because of faulty key pairs. This is a huge thing for me because uBlue updates in the background, and if I wouldn’t have read it here on Lemmy, I would have found out way too late, which is a security risk imo.

And now, my devices weren’t able to boot anymore due to some secure boot stuff. Again, if I wouldn’t have subscribed the Fedoramagazine, I would have noticed it way too late.
I was able to just boot into an older image and just paste a few commands from the magazine’s post, and it was resolved in just seconds (download time not included).

Both instances were only a minor thing for ME.
But both would have been a headache if I wouldn’t follow those blogs, which is a thing only nerds (like myself) do.
Nobody else cares about their OS, it is supposed to just work, hence why I use Atomic.

I don’t wanna blame the devs (both j0rge/ uBlue and the Fedora team), they were very quick, transparent and offered very simple fixes.
And, being able to just boot into an older image, just in case, is something I am very thankful for, but nothing I want to depend on.

Having to be informed about stuff like this and then having to use the CLI is just a no-go for most people.

Am I over-reacting about this too much? What’s your view on those things?

  • FliegenpilzgünniOPEnglish
    1•5 months ago

    Yeah. I use Aurora on my laptop, but, to be fair, I don’t reboot it as often. Maybe every 2-4 weeks I guess.

    I saw the announcement about the failing updates, tried to update my system, and that went as announced, failing to verify.
    I then executed the script, updated my OS successfully and rebooted.

    The system worked fine now for a few days. Yesterday I shut off the device, and today I got greeted by the failed secure boot, having to resort to the image before and fix it.

    On my gaming PC I use Bazzite, but I didn’t turn the PC on the last days. I only executed the update-fix-script, installed the pending updates, played for half an hour and then shut it off again.
    I will keep you up to date with the results once I come home.

    Btw, I asked my partner about her opinion on this. She said that problems like this may happen anywhere, no matter which software, and as long as the devs announce that and offer a simple fix, there’s nothing one can do about it.

    She only suggested a small “news channel” built into the OS.
    Do you think that might be possible to integrate, for example into the MOTD in the terminal? I don’t know if there are possible solutions out there.