Silverblue's move to bootable OCI images: Linux will never be the same

It's finally here, the cloud native linux desktop ... bringing OCI container images and booting right off of them. In this video I made my own version of Fedora Silverblue via a Containerfile (also known as Dockerfiles) and a GitHub action.
WARNING: This feature is in development, make sure you have backups and at a minimum at least one known-good snapshot!
Check out my stuff here: github.com/castrojo/ublue-image
Discussion thread on Fedora's Discourse: discussion.fedoraproject.org/...
#linux #fedora #gnome #kde #flatpak #silverblue #oci

[@Spwnt]

i've fallen down a similar immutable, atomic, image based os rabbit hole that you have fallen down over the last year and it's really exciting to watch you videos with the passion and excitement that i also feel for this stuff. keep up the good work. love it. i think people are really sleeping on this stuff. they don't realize how powerful and cool it is and it feels like the future of the linux desktop.

[@sohrobby]

Same! And I feel like the way the Fedora team is presenting it makes it easier for me to wrap my head around than having to learn Nix.

[@Gunzy83]

I just love how excited Jorge is here. I am excited by this as well.

[@cheebadigga4092]

This could actually be huge for enterprises as well! Nice one!!

[@Happy_Chappy]

Thank you for all you do to spread the immutable word :) Stumbled across your channel today and looking forward to catching up on all your content. You've got a new subscriber.

[@notyet3399]

Time for someone to build SilverSteam! Steamos experience with a silverblue backbone.

[@phonewithoutquestion80]

Holy crap that's sweet.

[@ultra98000]

Silverblue OCI distros are going to become the new ubuntu-based distros

[@florianm.5128]

Thank you for this video. I am hyped by that move!

[@diezgp]

This is pretty neat.

[@sanjeev2003]

Looking forward to it. Do make new videos after a few weeks if there is any new progress.

[@adamyork2333]

Yes, please do that.

[@adamyork2333]

This is cool. I am a KDE user. I'd like to see something like this for Kinoite.

[@JorgeCastro]

Check out 12:34 for someone else's containerfile using kinoite!

[@adamyork2333]

Awesome. When I made my comment I had not listened all the way through the video, so I was quite happy when I saw that. Please post more on this topic as you experiment more and learn more. Very interesting!

[@MyAmazingUsername]

UBlue has an official kinoite variant now.

[@lsdowdle]

Just wanted to mention, aside from the immutable part that is part of Silverblue, Fedora has offered the ability for users to create their own customized versions easily... buy using the the tools they provide for building live iso images. You can decide what packages you want, build your image, and when done... you have a live .iso image with what you want... and you can use it only as a live image or install it. That's actually how some of the Fedora-based distros have been able to do their own thing. It involves modifying one or more of the Fedora provided kickstart files... as Fedora publishes all of the kickstarts used to build their official live images. I'm glad you have an option for building one's own immutable media now.

[@ahsanurrahman9734]

Can you provide a link?

[@madbananas5555]

Good stuff, Jorge. I still need to get this fully. However, I get that what you're showing us here is how to rebase to a different tree, like we would do when moving between different versions of Silverblue, i.e., switching from Kinote to Sericea or "upgrading" to the next Fedora version. Now, how does this work when using an OCI image? From what I see in your presentation, once the image is downloaded, its filesystem is deployed as a new tree and set as the active deployment to boot from on the next boot -- is that right?

[@JorgeCastro]

Yeah, works the same, the results in the CLI are different as they will show an OCI remote instead: If you do an `rpm-status -v` mine show up as `ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:37` custom image (as an example). Yours likely says something like `fedora:fedora/37/x86_64/silverblue`

[@speedytruck]

This looks awesome. But I have a question. If I were to rebase to a different image with a different DE, for example, what would happen to the config files? I think /etc is writable, so will it be replaced, overwritten, or won't change at all? I know that different DEs don't play nice with others configs', so hopefully there is a way to take care of that.

[@gnuplusmatt]

FYI it's pronounced Ki like key to the door. A Quay is a place where a boat ties up. Yet another boat pun at Docker's expense

[@paulgupta2454]

Woah

[@inigoarejula2147]

What about update time? Each image is full downloaded or it is incremental?

[@andrecerqueira1061]

Incremental

[@sammypanda]

if this is the way the linux desktop is moving does that mean we are all going to narrow down to being exclusively based around fedora silverblue + rpm-ostree?

[@sammypanda]

@@lordkordus8139 i know, but uBlue is developed under silverblue tech. Vanilla is ABRoot so uBlue images don't work in that context. The reason i mentioned this was because of the few non-heuristic implementations there is likely to be one that turns out to do better than the others in applying to most use cases and being popular. So far, these immutable implementations are very greedy and isolated, and that's not likely to change since they kinda have to be in order to work. For example there is no system/home manager for nixpkgs without NixOS.

[@L5biszz]

The future is here.

[@CraigOlson]

sounds like how NixOS Flakes work..