Silverblue 2-week update and answers

[@joeloveslinux]

Fedora is very innovative. I like what they are doing.

[@Doriandotslash]

Me too!

[@Randomizer92mx]

The wallpaper is gorgeous!

[@mindright9771]

Excellent Video Dorian. I took your advise and installed Silverblue on an old Lenovo quad core laptop I had laying around and really liked what I saw in terms of performance. It didn’t take me long to get use to using the sudo rpm-ostree command and had three different layers installed. I even rolled back to the original just to see how well it worked (of which it works very well). I did have a problem with virtual box however which had me a bit miffed but I am going to give it a try again and see if I can get it to work. I know it can now because I saw you did it. =) Anyway, Thanks for the tips! I will be running it through some paces in my lab and let you know if I come up with anything unusual. Aloha!

[@Doriandotslash]

Awesome, glad to hear someone is having fun with it :) It's pretty solid and a neat concept. Make sure when you install VirtualBox you use capital V and B in the package name.

[@PoeLemic]

Love your videos. I've become a sub. I am so glad that you are updating us on this type of technology. I plan to use it (eventually) to learn how ostree's work and play with it myself.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! I hope you enjoy the channel content 😉

[@j800r]

Can't remember what I said on the last video, but I can definitely see this as being incredible for the enterprise going forward. I'm assuming Red Hat perhaps eventually have plans for possibly going in this direction and it will definitely give them a fresh edge imo. That kind of rock solid reliability with easy rollbacks seems like it could be indispensable. It would never catch on for the home user without a GUI control to simplify the process. For myself, TimeShift will suffice for now, but I am still fascinated by Silverblue's possibilities.

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I've been a TimeShift fan for a while but this is a whole different thing. I think I would still use TimeShift to backup my home directory, but it might be overkill and DejaDup might work well enough.

[@hotroof]

I can't wait! Keep 'em coming. Silverblue is such a cool project and so interesting. Thanks for helping me wrap my head around it. But take your time. No rush. As you said.. It's summer. Enjoy it.

[@Doriandotslash]

Indeed! I deleted Ubuntu so I had room to reinstall Silverblue on a larger partition. THEN, I took the plunge and finally deleted Windows 10 from my machine so that I could reinstall Silverblue on my SSD drive. That was huge for me since this machine CAME with Windows 10 and I thought I would always keep it... Yes summer is busy, and I'm off to a wedding now :P

[@hotroof]

@@Doriandotslash So to recap... Silverblue is now living in the penthouse suite (Prime Real Estate) and Window s has been evicted and kick to the curb like a bum.... Sounds like a good week. Have fun at the wedding!

[@LloydLynx]

Once the ostree model and Wayland make it to debian stable, desktop Linux will be complete.

[@marciovianna2370]

Endless OS = Debian stable + SystemD + Wayland + Ostree + Flatpak

[@yuriykazmirchuk9641]

Thanks for the great video and for your work! Fedora Linux definitely is the future of Linux 😎👍

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! It's definitely a viable option :)

[@hotroof]

So cool. Thank you for sharing all of this info. The Fedora Project should have Red Hat cut you a paycheck! Paid with IBM money of course! Great video. The most impressive feature of Silverblue is the bending of space and time. Editing videos before they're recorded is priceless. :)

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks Karl! That would be nice lol Glad you enjoyed the Inception bit in there ;)

[@thenextpoetician6328]

Good to see it's running smoothly. I've read running multiple environments can cause conflicts, so when doing so assigning each to a different user can help. That said, I'm running Gnome and lxde Manjaro in different accounts, but I haven't removed Gnome from the lxde user account. As long as it behaves, I'm leaving well enough alone.

[@Doriandotslash]

The only 2 I wouldn't mix personally are KDE and Gnome because they run lots of their own softwares, and it also makes a mess of having both DE's applications, like Gnome Files AND Dolphin etc... Running great so far, and works well for production!

[@thenextpoetician6328]

@@Doriandotslash True there are worst offenders, and generally happy neighbors too. Production looking good is important, and snappy justifies itself. :)

[@longnamedude3947]

Great video, could you do a video on LVM's? I'm thinking I'll give this a go

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I've been thinkining of doing that. Thank you!

[@TomAllnatt]

LVM definitely takes some getting your head around it but it is really cool and takes the hassle of needing to repartition drives. You can also use SSDs as a drive cache, similar to optane, for your slower platter HDs. I have a RAID 10 array of platter drives and then another RAID10 of SSDs acting as a cache for the slower array.

[@longnamedude3947]

@@TomAllnatt How did you achieve that in the end? I currently have my desktop running Manjaro KDE, my plan moving forward is to better understand LVM + LUKS2, and, hopefully implement a drive cache exactly like what you have described for my two pairs of 4TB HDD's, hopefully using 2x SATA 2.5inch SSDs as cache drives, one per 4TB of storage to help speed up read times. (Speeding up writes with such technology is a dangerous thing if my research is correct, similar to RAMDisks although not quite as volatile) Do you have discord at all? Maybe I could reach out to you on there and discuss this further? That is if you don't mind :)

[@christ.4977]

An immutable OS with containerization is the future. Awesome stuff.

[@tstechster3602]

I would love to see an example of how you set it up to dual boot. I did it, but I couldn’t figure out how to let the installer take care of the lvm stuff.

[@Doriandotslash]

So basically, if you have your free space set aside for Silverblue, create a 1GB FAT32 partition and a 1GB ext4 partition using a boot disk (LiveUSB) or another distro leaving the rest of the free space alone where you want to install Silverblue. Make note of the partition names, like /dev/sda1,2,3 etc Once in the installer where you select what disk to install on, select "Custom" and there should be a link that says something about automatically creating the partitions. It SHOULD pick up your 2 new 1GB Partitions as well and assign one to mount point /boot and the other to /boot/efi If it selects your REAL efi partition to mount to /boot/efi, then change it to instead point to the fat32 partition that you made. Then the install should finish properly. This is a workaround, but something I hope gets fixed soon.

[@lsatenstein]

Are you still using SilverBlue? If so, how do you handle rpmfusion and some tainted software (videos, drivers)?

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

Would be nice if he did a 6 month update and probably addressed some other questions or quirks

[@JahidulIslam]

you can install normal rpm package through rpm-ostree. So rpmfusion, nvidia driver all can be installed.

[@helloboris]

Please could you add a little light to your comments at 9m40 ish of this great little video. After you've created the dummy efi/boot how do you link this ensemble to the bootloader (systemd-boot? Grub and?). What does the loader/entry look like? Thank-you in advance

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Dorian. This is very interesting. I am a long-time user of Debian and its derivatives. I've dabbled with RHEL and Fedora some time ago. But this... hm.

[@Doriandotslash]

It is interesting indeed, and like nothing I've used before. But it's working very well so far. Thanks for watching!

[@AbarSimorgh]

Great video. Thank you for sharing your experiences.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks for watching! :D

[@bekkur81]

Excellent video! Very interested in an Nvidia Optimus walkthrough.

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I’ll have to do one I think.

[@tstechster3602]

I’d like that, too!

[@gizzmoguy.]

Where can i get the icon theme its beautiful.

[@mahdip.4674]

How about installing apps that may use other directories than Home, like Spark?

[@Doriandotslash]

I've never used Spark. but directories like /etc and /var which are written to often, are writable by applications. If it doesn't work properly for whatever reason, you could always install Spark in a toolbox container as well.

[@dacritter8397]

Excellent followup. I've been running SilverBlue as a primary little longer than you have, but I haven't gone as in depth as you obviously have. The longer I use it the more I like it. It does have a bit of a learning curve but nothing too scary for any halfway experienced Linux user. So far I've had zero issues with updates, but I have rolled back a few times just to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to do. So far it rolls back perfectly. I mostly write code, browse, email, office stuff... typical get stuff done work which is pretty low risk for breaking the system. I think I'll mess around with other desktops as well. Those don't always play well on the same system in other distros... have you had any snafus with multiple desktops? Anyway, thanks for the update.

[@Doriandotslash]

Great to hear from someone else who is using it, thanks for that! No issues so far using Cinnamon. I did install Plasma just as a test but I wouldn't use it much. Gnome and Plasma are 2 desktops that don't get along together and also cause some system bloat.

[@stjames6176]

please show how you do the partitioning.. I have spent an entire day trying to. thank you

[@Doriandotslash]

Did you not do the automatic partitioning?

[@stjames6176]

@@Doriandotslash I tried all the options provided.. and they failed :(

[@UpcycleElectronics]

Yup. Nice call. Going after the Silverblue iso now. You've got an LVM partition here. Do you have a good way to do iso backups of LVM? Thanks. -Jake

[@UpcycleElectronics]

The official Silverblue site is down right now for some reason. I got an iso from here (US from Redhat Servers): download-cc-rdu01.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/Silverblue/x86_64/iso/

[@Doriandotslash]

If you let Silverblue do the auto-partitioning it’ll pick LVM. But if you do it manually, you can also choose regular ext4 as well. Works the same no matter which you pick, it’s just that Fedora always defaults to LVM.

[@UpcycleElectronics]

@@Doriandotslash Too late. Got it running on a noisy old spare HDD inside the Leno. LVM it is...for now. If you ever get the chance take 5min and check out an ancient thinkpad tablet. This thing is weird, cool, and totally ridiculous at the same time. It uses some kind of proximity detection and (I think) a resistive element, aka a touch screen from back before accuracy (capacitive elements) were a thing. The final mouse "click" is done on the screen with the stylus. A unique cursor comes on the screen when the Leno specific stylus is within a few centimeters and it tracks the tip in mid-air. It's kinda like the luv child of Duck Hunt and a smart phone. There is also a button on the stylus that can do stuff on the screen. There are no batteries. I'm not sure if it's using capacitance or inductance, but it's very amusing for all of 5 min. Anyways, I think it's support is embedded into firmware in the hardware. That, or the kernel has support with the default Silverblue settings. Hopefully the Silverblue site gets back up and running soon. I haven't tried Fedora until now, but this looks like a good fit, especially if they have a stage 3 minimum ISO hiding around somewhere. I saw some stuff on the mirrors but couldn't tell one from another based on the repository and file naming alone. I prefer a stage 3 because I don't like switching desktops. It always seems like I have some bloat left behind. Thanks again for the reference. -Jake

[@vishwakarma00]

what if you keep it as your primary os and how's battery life with this ? which desktop environment gives better battery life and performance ? just curious. Right now, I am using solus, it gives good battery life but I am just tired with its own package system. any suggestions from your side ?

[@PhilipDudley3]

Did you end up making the video explaining how to get Steam to work with the ostree, COPR, and optirun things?

[@Doriandotslash]

Not yet, but it is on my to-do list :)

[@shorthornstudios]

Fantastic Video! Really made me have second thoughts about budgie on solus and I'm now installing a vm to tinker before I make my final decision next summer on which distro I use

[@Doriandotslash]

That's great! I hope it works out well :)

[@carltonlandry1972]

So if you do something in Firefox with the layer your in, then reboot into layer 3, will Firefox be the same are is it considered a New Firefox being it's sandboxed?

[@Doriandotslash]

Application settings are not affected by rolling back, only the applications themselves are. So if you bookmark something and then rollback to a previous configuration, the bookmark will still be there.

[@danimunitz]

Great content! Can we get that wallpaper? Thanks!

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! here you go wallpapercave.com/minimal-wallpaper

[@leloupization]

I'd really love for you to take a look at OpenSUSE MicroOS. Very similar but using btrfs as the default partition scheme. I'm curious if you see much of a difference

[@leloupization]

It's also based on tumbleweed. So you could address a previous issue you've mentioned too. Your Arch-> Debian video mentioned how you couldn't update often because of internet and your system broke. I'd be surprised if that happened with Tumbleweed, and you'd have up to date software.

[@Doriandotslash]

Sounds interesting!

[@josemfacuna6754]

can you show how to instal VirtualBox?

[@Doriandotslash]

Just install RPM Fusion and then you can install VirtualBox with 'rpm-ostree install VirtualBox' Don't forget the capital V and B. I don't know why they made it like that but there you go

[@aaronh6174]

I am assuming you was using Xorg when you was running OBS? Was sure the "voodoo they do" using ostree didn't somehow get OBS running in Wayland. Helpful video for those that are looking to move to this space as it seems like it may be the way we are headed going forward.

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I logged in with Xorg because OBS cannot capture Wayland yet. Thanks!

[@neffscape6353]

Ok if I got this right the goal of Silverblue is to provide a system where the core os is separated from the desktop applications, so that you can install new OS images and revert back if something goes wrong. So it''s going to be great to test new releases of the OS and eventually downgrade if needed. If this is the use case, I don't fully get the toolbox thing...

[@Doriandotslash]

Marco Boneff yes correct. Using flatpaks makes those apps independent of the OS since they don’t need dependencies from the OS other than flatpak itself. The toolbox is for running containers, similar to Docker and other container systems. Useful for developing or running isolated applications on a server.

[@neffscape6353]

@@Doriandotslash Provided that I'm not a developer and I don't run linux servers, I really like the concept and I think would actually help in the desktop space too (no more upgrade issues from version to version, finally universal packages and no need for multiple mantainers. I also discovered in another video that is potentially possible to add snapd to the core image, therefore expansing software availability. I'm excited! Is this concept used by other distros other than Fedora?

[@Doriandotslash]

You can also use it as a regular user to run a solid system that will never break from updates. Endless OS also uses OSTree, and a few others. But Silverblue is the most developed one imo

[@RockTheCage55]

I've used most major distro types: Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Suse, Slackware but never a redhat spin.. The changes in silverblue definitely excite me. Being a developer i can tell the changes are complicated :) so i think i'm going to wait a few versions and let all the bugs get worked out before i use it on a production machine. The only difficult thing for me would not having access to the AUR. I love arch....

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes I also use Arch but mostly Manjaro. This system has been in the works since I think Fedora 27 and maybe earlier. I haven’t had anything go too bad yet except that it doesn’t like to dualboot.

[@hrishikeshumralia765]

@@Doriandotslash dual boot with windows works

[@xhivo97]

Is there any particular case that would break this type of system? For desktop use this could be the future indeed, the overhead is not much with modern hardware it seems if at all.

[@Doriandotslash]

Maybe a complete hard drive failure or other hardware issues... I suppose it's possible to mess up the boot partition, but you would almost have to do that on purpose :)

[@hrishikeshumralia765]

Does adding to many layers cause problems!?

[@Doriandotslash]

None so far. All it would do is use more hard drive space.

[@TomAllnatt]

I just did a little partitioning -shows 200000000 partitions

[@Doriandotslash]

lol

[@masifakbar]

is it possible to use gui based development apps like vs-code and sql explorers through toolbox?

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes it is!

[@masifakbar]

@@Doriandotslash does toolbox supports images from other registries?

[@Doriandotslash]

It supports OCI-compliant images. I haven’t tried any others. Only Fedora and CentOS.

[@johnlewis7736]

You make great videos. I'd like to see what your using to edit them "wait, you're editing the video that your making now?" And the nvidia vs Intel at the same time was crazy!

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks very much 👍

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

When accessing the directories on different partitions has been slightly annoying with Flatpaks in general. I have flatpaks on my main partitions, but I have files on different partitions I need access to. It has been a pain at times navigating to those partitions or in some cases they were not even visible. Do you seem to have a problem with that?

[@Doriandotslash]

I have to agree there and yes I have the same problem. Usually I’ll just copy what I need into my local home folder. This is a rare thing though. Usually for ISO files to use with Gnome Boxes virtual machines.

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

@@Doriandotslash Thank you for replying btw, I am on F30 workstation but have been slowly transitioning to using flatpaks more. I've been using flatpaks on/off since F27 with varying degree of success, more recently with better choice in software I have increased usage of flatpaks. My gripes are with Steam & emulators, have the issue with navigating out of the flatpak and into a different partition. kdenlive and Shotcut has been a pain since i have ffmpeg and other binaries compiled to expose nvenc. this was a COMPLETE failure. sorry for the long reply & thanks

[@Bonfostar]

How did you get optirun working on fedora? I tried several times but i never had any luck. Only in Manjaro i was able to get that working. Can you do a video about it please?

[@Doriandotslash]

I will do a video on it. This may help get you working : docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/bumblebee/ A tip to be able to install COPR repos in Silverblue is to use rpm-ostree to install dnf and dnf-plugins-core which will allow you to use COPR repos in Silverblue.

[@arlansyah]

nice innovation, but maybe i'll stick with workstation version, also if you have a time would you like to try Clear Linux?

[@Doriandotslash]

Both are great, just different implementations. I tried installing Clear once or twice but never got far. Not something I would use personally.

[@Lenduya]

I'd be very interested in the Optimus video since my laptop has two GPUs as well. Or is there a guide you used to make it up and running?

[@Doriandotslash]

I will be making a 3rd Silverblue video 🙂

[@ishanagarwal475]

I need some applications which I download by snap but it is not a option in silverblue

[@Doriandotslash]

If you add the flathub repo there is not flatpak version? Which ones in particular are you looking for?

[@ishanagarwal475]

There is flathub repo for the free version but it looks broken(even with the default adwaita theme) it's the eclipse ide I need it for java

[@ishanagarwal475]

Is it possible to rebase my fedora 30 installation to silverblue?

[@Doriandotslash]

Ah. Yeah I don't use Eclipse so I can't help you there, but there might be an alternative you could use. Also, if you use a toolbox, you can install the regular eclipse package in it and run it from there... As for rebasing F30 to Silverblue, I don't think you can because the core of the OS is completely different (the way it's implemented).

[@ishanagarwal475]

Thanks it worked

[@caravanbarrel4049]

Show how to configure SELinux security policies for Flatpak (or Docker) applications. For example, deny\allow Internet access using SELinux

[@Doriandotslash]

You don’t need SELinux to do that. Just look at the flatpak documentation for the override option to allow or deny different sandbox options.

[@caravanbarrel4049]

@@Doriandotslash Thank. I was not interested in flatpak, that you can limit resources with it. Can you shoot a video about security settings with SELinux in any of the distributions in the future? Interesting experience installing / configuring SELinux in Archlinux and Gentoo

[@Doriandotslash]

I’ll look into it. Thanks!

[@TheWhitsboy]

I have been trying to install SB but I keep getting the "oops something went wrong" page. Still trying to figure it out, would really like to give SB a go. Thanks for the videos. Excellent work.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! At what point are you getting this error?

[@TheWhitsboy]

DorianDotSlash AFter installation is complete & I reboot

[@Doriandotslash]

Hmm. I never had this issue on any of my systems. I would suggest asking in the Silverblue forums. People there have been using it much longer and are the experts on it.

[@TheWhitsboy]

DorianDotSlash Thanks for your help.

[@dan_]

Would Silverblue work within a VM, or does it require any special access to hardware to function properly? I'm running Qubes so am interested to try this out as a template, but not sure if I'll encounter any weird issues trying to run it in that environment. As a side note, you're one of my favourite Linux channels so I'd love to see/hear your thoughts and experiences with Qubes OS, if you've used it.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you! I have used it in a VM but I'm not sure how well it would run as a Qubes template. I've used Qubes a few times over the years and it's actually installed on my main computer right now... I've thought of doing a video on it, but, I have a hard time personally finding a good use case for it. It is very interesting though for sure!

[@Grinzold8]

Cool wallpaper! Could you share a link if it's free to use somewhere? Nice video as well!

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks. I don’t remember exactly where I got it but just search for abstract triangle wallpapers.

[@Grinzold8]

Found it! wallhere.com/en/wallpaper/35746

[@C6TTiX]

www.wallpaperflare.com/red-and-purple-wall-decor-abstract-graphic-design-polyscape-wallpaper-pcift

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks Chuck! I was on my cell phone when I replied so it was hard to find :)

[@Lenduya]

Hi, I'm an Android developer, how well does Silverblue work with it?

[@Doriandotslash]

I can’t answer that honestly. I don’t know Android.

[@xWe2s]

Sounds like very stable and robust system. :D

[@Doriandotslash]

It has been so far!

[@RichardBrooklyn]

With regards to installing KDE: you're doing it wrong. Search for "Kinoite" and you'll hopefully find a forum thread which allows you to rebase your install on KDE, XFCE and others. It's pretty much a single person project and it was very buggy and not updated when I tried it a couple of months ago but I was an amazing proof of concept of how the system could be swapped out to a KDE centric base image quickly and simply. No conflicts, no messing about with stray programs from each desktop appearing in menus. It was amazing. Like installing a new OS really quickly and easily. Hopefully the bugs I experienced have been ironed out how. I think some of them have.

[@Doriandotslash]

I’ve heard of it, but I also read about the issues so I never ventured into it. I might have to give it a shot then. Thanks!

[@unclefester9113]

You are a very sophisticated user as evidenced by your video.

[@Doriandotslash]

Well, I'm a long-time user, and I know my way around. I know a bit of everything but I wouldn't say very sophisticated :P But thanks for the compliment! lol

[@unclefester9113]

why in the world are mere seconds matter when you're talking about reboot times ? Anything under 20 seconds is glorious. Your video was a good explanation of features. - even if it was a teensie bit esoteric. Most people are concerned with 1) Does it work well 2) Is it stable and durable 3) Will it self destruct after complete or partial upgrades 4) Is it suitable for the average user or only the super skillful Linux Professional ....

[@Doriandotslash]

You're right about reboot times. As for the video, I did try to keep it simple enough for anyone to follow along, or at least that was the intention... Yes it works well, is stable, won't self destruct and is suitable for average Linux users. :)

[@lue016]

Tried GuixSD or NixOS?

[@Doriandotslash]

I played with NixOS briefly before, and I'll look into it again. Never heard of GuixSD though.

[@lue016]

@@Doriandotslash i personally think that NixOS or better GuixSD are the future of linux

[@JaminFernandez]

Thanks for tips /boot/efi partition flag ESP

[@johanb.7869]

Nice one Dorian. LIked the smash button;)

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks Johan 😎👍

[@thomasmaurer1097]

you should Raid 0 ... i get about "vary's a-lot on my configuration ... " i have 4 spindle HD's ... i HW raid -0 2 x 2 ... " i make a few drives out of the 2 raid controllers AKa - 4 drives/(partitions)" .. then i SW raid *mdadm * 2 of those drives for the 4x1 raid-0 drive .... ... i get faster boot times if if i split the (root `/ ) and (/home /boot) on different drives than i would with all 4hd raid-0 setup .. ... this is because spindle drives (HD's) are slower with smaller file size ... my big file speeds are around 500MB's that faster than some SSD's ... not so much at smaller files ... .. i can copy/ move my 15 GB linux root folder (for backups in about 5 minutes *40 + K of files .... just an idea for you .... my boot time with bio's is around 20 sec for KDE

[@Doriandotslash]

This machine is a laptop with a single slot nvme ssd and one mechanical drive. I don’t bother doing raid as the ssd is quick and my NAS is raid 5 for backing up my data.

[@HyoumaSaid]

thankyou , u should use 1 home for all ur distros but with different usernames better than giving each distro 100gb and when u remove any distro it will remove ur home so better is to make separate home 200gb less or more and every distro root 30gb

[@Doriandotslash]

All of my important stuff is all on one distro, and backed up onto my NAS.

[@stub1116]

Brilliant.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you!

[@duser]

coming from windows, i wasn't sure why you made such a big fuss about having to reboot so many times. windows update has ruined me.

[@alexandrprincip6366]

Compare it with NixOS and make review.

[@Doriandotslash]

I'll look into that :)

[@fuzen5355]

Alexandr Princip NixOS isn’t user friendly, and I think that’s really where it’s limited. Reproducible systems are great just not for everyone.

[@fuzen5355]

I think this is cool, but simply too complicated, systemd brought enough complexity to the Linux echo system we don’t need the whole os to be a docker container. I’ll just stick with my volume snapshots per partition. I think Linux needs more innovative solutions that are simple like Wireguard.

[@Doriandotslash]

The OS isn't a container, it's an immutable OS image. It's a different way of doing things and it's working fantastic so far.