Hello all, I’ve been distro hopping a lot lately and have a long term goal of settling on one distro for the family laptops.
Currently it’s a smattering of linux distro’s and some M$ across all the systems in the house.
In short the fam has had a pretty negative reaction to Gnome for all the usual reasons, so there is a kubuntu instance, Nobara, but the KDE version, Manjaro etc… I kind of want to give Fedora a stint on my laptop and noticed the Fedora spins project and was wondering if anyone has played around with it at all?
I spun up the KDE version in a VM alongside the default Fedora and noticed it’s running a newer kernel than the default, which is interesting…
Is it an equal partner in update cycles?
If you want a KDE Fedora powered experience I definitely have to suggest Universal Blue Kinoite-main or Bazzite-Desktop. 🤟
Universal Blue project is OCI RPM OSTREE container native, atomic Fedora.
Silverblue/Kinoite/Serica/Onyx, but with extra batteries+codecs+hardware acceleration out of the box.
Bazzite is pretty amazing 🎮:
Project Bluefin for Developers 🦖:
If you update your normal Fedora system, they should all be running the same kernel.
Sometimes the installers can be stale…you can try installing ISOs from the net installer or nightlies:
Rather… I tried to find links to share… But everything looks to be rawhide… 😕
On atomic side, ublu automatically updates the system image, any layered RPMs as well as flatpaks and other containers/Docker/Podman/Distrobox.
Like Steam OS, if you want to enable -testing channel for updates on Ublu, you can make it more bleeding edge.
So you convinced me, and not being a novice, I didn’t read the install instructions and just went for it. It wrecked my dual boot efi partition. No worries, been there done that before, spent all morning trying to get the eufi shell and grub sorted out. After a few hours of failing, I’m like hey I planned for this, I’ve got a USB recovery for windows, and my actual data is all backed up via syncthing (thanks to this community). Why am I bothering with this nonsense.
Omg… Recovering windows takes foreeeeever. So then I’m reading the kenoite instructions and it calls out that dual booting doesn’t work, here is a suggested partition scheme… Ffs… Anyway for anyone that doesn’t want to waste an entire day on this, rtfm.
I think most dual booters on Ublu use seperate drives for windows.
And use their BIOS to boot to that drive instead of grub.
Here’s the thing about that, my laptop does have two nvme drives, but the second one is strictly for games. It’s not negotiable.
FWIW, I’ve put some effort into explaining how a dual boot of Windows 10 and Fedora Atomic (read Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea etc) can be achieved. While it’s far from exhaustive, it should be fine as long as your specific installation of Fedora Atomic doesn’t require special attention (which happens sometimes with owners of an Nvidia GPU*). After Fedora Atomic is successfully installed, proceed with following the instructions found on the following parts of uBlue’s documentation: here, here and finally pick whichever uBlue image you’d like to install from this list; specific instructions are found directly underneath the text boxes for each individual image, but ensure you’re installing the one with the correct Fedora version (37/38/39/stable/latest etc (which are accessed via tabs)). If you can’t decide on which version you’d like to install, then just go for 39.
Why ublue over fedora’s images? You won’t have fedoras signatures anymore. You can install the same stuff on official images
Ya, but you’re overlaying all that stuff, codecs, nvidia, etc. ublue works out of the box and updates are quicker due to not having to re-overlay everything. It’s just less friction. Also it comes with automatic updates enabled which is really nice (and safe in an immutable, intrinsically rollbackable environment)
Overlaying isn’t bad. It’s kind of what we’ve done the past years anyway.
Does the speed of updates matter in any way? Unless it’s not days, there’s no reason for me to complain update the duration since everything is done in the background.
What’s the difference to the auto update in silverblue?
Ootb fedora doesn’t even have gnome extensions installed. We have to adjust our systems anyway
Personally, I’ve been enjoying uBlue over vanilla Fedora Atomic for what they offer in terms of system management.
To give you a better idea on what I mean; just a month ago an update to Podman caused breakage and people weren’t able to use their containers created with Distrobox/Toolbx[1]. Sure; a rollback is accomplished relatively easy and I’m sure some would even be able to fix it themselves. Regardless, every Fedora Atomic user that relied on Podman would have been interrupted to some capacity.
Which, of course, begs the following questions… Isn’t it very inefficient for everyone to fix this issue themselves? Wouldn’t it be easier if somehow Fedora forced some fix upon all of us so that just one entity is burdened instead of all of us? Heck, wouldn’t it be better if Fedora just withhold the update until it’s fixed? Is this perhaps some pipe dream that will never see the light of day? etc…
The interesting part, though, would be how I (a ‘uBlue-user’) didn’t even notice Podman was causing issues in the first place. “How?” you might ask, well… The uBlue devs noticed the issue, applied some magic so that I and many other uBlue users like me just went on with their day like they would otherwise; without being interrupted because Podman just had a bad update. (Did the supposed pipe dream actually already exist in some form or fashion?)
This is just the most recent example of this. But in the last year or so, out of the top of my head, there have been a few more times in which uBlue users didn’t even notice a thing while the others either had to rollback or fix their issues themselves. If you enjoy this interruption and/or are willing to deal with it for the sake of whatever, then please feel to continue to do so. However, I prefer to have a system I can rely on at all times and uBlue offers me just that while remaining very close to vanilla Fedora Atomic.
It depends if you have the luxury to rely on them in the first place.
If setting up your workflow (or whatever) requires you to get to the nitty gritty of things and change those parts of the system that strictly speaking isn’t well supported by just
rpm-ostree, then -for almost a year now- your best bet would have been to (instead) experiment with (what’s been referred in Fedora’s Wiki as) Ostree Native Containers.And the truth is, unless you really know what you’re doing, that uBlue offers the best platform to engage with this system. Heck, within a week after Kinoite’s very own maintainer blogged about how to sign container images via Github actions, one of uBlue’s maintainers tried to implement this for uBlue to improve their own platform and succeeded.
Finally, let’s not forget that uBlue is even endorsed by Fedora (or at least by whoever maintains its documentation). Heck, even the inception of uBlue was due to an interaction between Jorge Castro (one of uBlue’s maintainers) and Colin Walters (one of the masterminds behind the whole
rpm-ostree-ecosystem).P.S. If I hadn’t made it clear, it’s totally fine to continue to rely on Fedora Atomic directly without any interventions from third parties for system management or whatsoever. I just wanted to elaborate why I, personally, prefer to use images provided by uBlue.
Plus one for ublue images