Fedora Silverblue: An Immutable OS

[@TheEvilSkelly]

Great overview! I use Fedora Silverblue on both my desktop and laptop because I like keeping everything separate from the host system. All my used applications are installed as a Flatpak, and I use Toolbox and Podman when needed. I also like the nature of OSTree, where it follows the same concept as Git. Furthermore, Fedora has a track record of innovating the Linux desktop, e.g. they were the very first distribution to ship with systemd, and now they are using btrfs and PipeWire by default! All their packages are LTS, except kernel and DEs, which is my favorite release cycle. I want packages to be very stable while also using the latest and greatest versions of GNOME and Linux, because btrfs is still work in progress and improves very quickly, and because GNOME is innovating the desktop space as well. I have been using Silverblue for a couple of months now, and I am not planning to switch to something else. In case you're curious, if I were to distro hop, I would choose MicroOS (immutable openSUSE) or NixOS. All hail containers and immutability!

[@ps5hasnogames55]

> innovation > systemd

[@cory1111]

I use nix os and I love it

[@JahidulIslam]

@Urip Andono you can probably do this during installation using advanced option.

[@TheBrainQC]

Always clear explanation of what is all about, TY.

[@micleh]

I'm always delighted that you inform your community about interesting Linux concepts like this one. Lennart Poettering has been talking about his vision of an immutable system for quite some time, and I loved it from the get-go. I'd appreciate the Linux community and many distributions focusing their collaborative resources and effort on realizing this concept. It might even start tidying up the cluttered and inconsistent Linux directory tree.

[@MiningForPies]

It sounds fantastic.

[@derekr54]

At last a video about Silverblue that is easy to understand. Well presented and very informative,I now feel I am able to give it a try myself without any worries.Thanks EF for the video.

[@eflinux]

Thanks!

[@MichaelSharpTechniSmart]

Ermanno breaks it down well. Silverblue is targeted developers, but it suits my needs (non-dev) This is just what I have been looking for and I think it is the future.

[@craigstone975]

Silverblue is awesome. All the chmod 400 stuff already done. Out of box with gnome40 used 2.5 gig of ram and loaded up 6.5 gig. Container mgmt is perfect. As good or better than bsd with jails and all ready to go. Aarch64 iso support for arm procs as well. Thanks for showing this Ermanno. This is definitely a production OS. Thanks also to Fedora. Ran in to first issue with silverblue. No dkms which makes sense for immutable std os release. However there is no rtl8821cu driver for the kernel. Think i need to build my own base in a toolbox with rpm-ostree compose then add in dkms and the drivers i need. Oops no systemd for Silverblue containers. Use podman for container management

[@Andreas-fh9zf]

Danke für das ausführliche Video, Ermanno! LG

[@eflinux]

Danke Andreas!

[@PedroMosqueda]

Excellent, i will tried silverblue some time ago, but i return to my beloved arch. Thank you ermano.

[@eflinux]

My pleasure!

[@GabrielMolter]

Amazing video! I played around on Silverblue and really like it

[@abobader]

Thanks for this video that clear for whom do not know what the Fedora Silverblue are, well done.

[@eflinux]

Thanks!

[@theproudlinuxer]

Wow! 9.6 MB/s! That's an amazing speed! (Mine has the limit of 6 MB/s, that too works only in Arch. Fedora updates run at 290KB/s - 600 KB/s)

[@bookhacloud5536]

awesome video as usual ! i wish you do more videos about fedora silverblue seems so interesting, downloading it right now for a try many thanks

[@eflinux]

Thanks, will do!

[@bookhacloud5536]

@@eflinux pleaseeee also check fedora kionite

[@eflinux]

I will :)

[@marvicdigital]

I like it Silver Blue, sometime i will try it... I like your video and much more the excellent explanation. Thank you

[@TheSparkybon]

Really like this concept, gonna give it a go. Thanks for video.

[@ivanhoe1024]

I cannot believe how fast dnf is on your system! It is very usable, while most of the time it can take even 5-10 seconds for a simple search of a package, not even considering installing it... I believe it’s due to the metadata format, which are huge and slow to query if compared to pacman’s or apt’s... anyway, your system feels like you installed in directly on RAM and you host on your LAN a Fedora Repo mirror! :D

[@eflinux]

It is usually slower.

[@mangenshinobi1567]

this video made me more want to install silverblue

[@socvirnylestela5878]

OOOH 😮 what a good idea. an immutable OS. i wanna try that in the future

[@AlemannoDigitale]

Wunderbar, vielen dank!

[@eflinux]

Bitteschön!

[@AlemannoDigitale]

@@eflinux ❤️

[@0a1n]

Excellent video! Whats your general thoughts on silverblue and the new way of maintaining an OS it brings?

[@eflinux]

So far, I love it tbh. It changes the focus of what you're doing on the PC completely. It's a little odd at first, but one gets used to it pretty quickly.

[@tulpar7170]

Thank you just Love it your way explaning

[@craigw4644]

Nice, looks bullet proof, perfect for a newbie.

[@martinsmit256]

Yeah, everybody else wants to break their system once in a while ...

[@mtahadev]

You're using obs studio on wayland with pipewire? And do you use fedora by default? Or is it archlinux?

[@eflinux]

In this video I am using Fedora with that setup. However, my main distro is Arch and there I can set up the machine the same way.

[@sc0or]

As I face more and more issues during Arch update (lost keys, conflicted/renamed/broken libs, etc), and because of this I try to reduce number of updates to a minimal value (to have my development workstation working), I start to think about Fedora Silverblue.

[@NormanF62]

If you know what you’re doing, power users will find an immutable os too cramped. If you don’t, that’s exactly what you should run and apart from customisation, most people benefit from leaving things well enough alone.

[@NormanF62]

The only drawback of making the root file read only is you can’t make changes like adding new global themes, icon themes or wallpapers to the root directory which prevents you from doing that. Any customisation will have to be made through your hidden /.local folder which should still be editable.

[@noah5592]

It doesn't really matter too much for most linux desktop users I think. You might be able to use `rpm-ostree usroverlay` ( Apply a transient overlayfs to /usr ) for this use case however.

[@drishalballaney]

could you also please take a look at NixOS? it is also an immutable OS iirc

[@eflinux]

I will!

[@CristianMolina]

Yeah, or Guix. They have functional package system that achieves the same problem but I thing in different ways

[@gurugara2850]

What's the purpose of toolbox if you can use VM?, Toolbox is still using host files and once you create a container and remove it, there is still unused files and folders left in the host

[@夕阳-n1h]

great video.

[@ciba2227]

Android, Chrome and MacOS are in large part immutable what stops someone from patching malicious software to the boot image?

[@NormanF62]

The boot image is read only like the rest of the root system. You can’t change it and even if somehow you messed it up, you can revert it. Malware is a thing of the past because either the base system is read only or apps run in their own container so even if you were able to infect an app it won’t compromise the os on which it runs.

[@tristanrexsantiago4276]

Is this a better replacement for rolling distros? I'm a fan of rolling distros but what I experienced is after some major system and application updates, incompatibilities arise. Does the immutable nature of Silverblue address it?

[@eflinux]

That’s the idea, since applications are sandboxed in flatpaks.

[@tristanrexsantiago4276]

what will happen if the system updates, lets say Gnome 40, and applications do not which are still based on Gnome 3.3x? Distros having a release cycle eliminates this problem

[@eflinux]

Most applications come with the rpm-ostree, so you’ll not have to worry about that.

[@tristanrexsantiago4276]

@@eflinux Thanks for the video. Immutable OS is a breakthrough. It caught my attention because of this video. Will definitely give it a shot

[@JahidulIslam]

@@tristanrexsantiago4276 You will mostly use flatpak apps and appimage. It will work even if you rebase to older version of Fedora silverblue or heck CentOS 8. I experimented that. I installed Fedora Silverblue and installed few flatpak apps. Then did upgrade silverblue and pinned this update. Then rebased to CentOS 8 and used the same flatpak apps there. Then deleted CentOS 8 and used same flatpak apps on silverblue

[@nico1337]

Is it possible to use graphical applications in a toolbox?

[@eflinux]

Yes, but they won't show up in applications, you have to start them from the terminal.

[@Felipe-gz9uy]

@@eflinux You can create .desktop files manually ... and so they will show up in applications menu.

[@JahidulIslam]

You can even play games inside the container if you have same version of OS and GPU driver installed inside the container.

[@sergiuoanes4635]

it can be installed only as Gnome? Fedora server doesn't come as SilverBlue?

[@eflinux]

At the moment Gnome only, but KDE might come with the next release.

[@harato]

I think Fedora CoreOS is the server variant of Silverblue

[@NormanF62]

Kinoite is the KDE version and I expect other desktops to eventually embrace the concept.

[@DavidHaras]

Hi Ermanno, I installed this a couple of days ago on my laptop it all went well with automatic installation and even correctly put my home folder onto the correct drive that I had selected. I decided to go back to Endeavour as Silverblue although excellent did not have the flexibility that I like with regard to certain programs that I use, for instance I like using Vivaldi as my browser and it is awkward to install in SB, however, I am going to give it a go as a VM just to see what it takes to get the installation to my liking. As always excellent video. :)

[@eflinux]

Thanks for sharing David!

[@DavidHaras]

Hey Ermanno, I went back and reinstalled Silverblue, I have Vivaldi installed and all my favourite apps, I have to say I am now enjoying the experience. Going to stick around for a bit and see how it works out.

[@Geert.]

@@DavidHaras How did things work out?

[@thebusinessfirm9862]

Grazie. Sei molto bravo.

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks

[@mangenshinobi1567]

How to install Linux kernel 5.12 in fedora?

[@eflinux]

If it is not yet available it means it's not ready yet for Fedora, but it should be soon. Usually the latest kernel on Arch comes to Fedora a week or so later.

[@mangenshinobi1567]

@@eflinux thank you Sir 😃

[@theproudlinuxer]

This is insane! I'll try to remove Fedora and install Silverblue... Fedora has been a great switch from distro-hopping. Now, I'm hopping to the *better* Fedora.

[@rishirajsaikia1323]

Why did Fedora make you stop from distro hopping ? Please elaborate !

[@theproudlinuxer]

@@rishirajsaikia1323 I installed Fedora with GNOME desktop (as most people do), and found that it takes up 1.5 gigs. Then, I got a recommendation of installing KDE. I actually like KDE, but I'd be very disappointed since it feels extremely laggy even when the Compositor is set as XRender (my PC is 15 years old). But Fedora 33 (shipped with Plasma 5.20) was entirely different. Once I switched to XRender, the experience was amazing! KDE became butter-smooth!!! And then, I dropped the idea of switching to some other one. Even though Fedora is my main OS, I have the habit of trying out new distros, and installing Arch Linux every month (so that I get practised). That's my story 😂😂

[@ablanchi]

Immutable OS are really cool, unfortunately they make some things very difficult. Like if you use software that you need to manually build and install, like if you use bleeding edge neovim, tmux, suckless software, or for what ever reason need to run some random proprietary binary or appimage.

[@Felipe-gz9uy]

Appimages just works at my Silverblue. And build and install random apps are very easy. I just install in toolbox (containers). You can put any kind of unstable software there ... if you don't need it anymore ... just erase the container (clean system!)

[@NormanF62]

The idea is of course is any change made should not render the os inoperable and you cannot delete key system files and even if you did delete them, you can revert those changes and for newbies that’s probably good because they shouldn’t mess around with root at all.

[@mustafababdullah2485]

Two things are new fresh air you and the temperature here is almost 30° 😂 nice i haven't looked at silverblue in a while.

[@ari_archer]

for me, personally, it's would be annoying :), though I can see how it can be useful in certain areas

[@eflinux]

I understand :) It was very new for me as well, but, I got used to it very quickly.

[@ari_archer]

@@eflinux nice! :D

[@web3wizard381]

Theme & wallpaper pls

[@NormanF62]

Like I said, you make those changes in your home /.local folder since you can’t do it root. Usr/share is off bounds.

[@24wherath36]

Sounds a lot like NixOS.

[@drishalballaney]

hmm yes, I have to myself also try Nix OS at some point in time, I wish EF would do an install guide on it

[@eflinux]

I will :)

[@mustafababdullah2485]

When will you show how to install ect ect selinux on Arch? 😂 Fedora 34 kde has the same wallpaper as gnome 40 imagine that

[@Felipe-gz9uy]

Ah, rpm-ostree now allows you to use an installed package without restart: rpm-ostree install -A/--apply-live gnome-tweak-tool

[@eflinux]

Thanks for sharing!