So I took the plunge and installed Fedora Silverblue because of all that immutable buzz. And it’s the most frustrating change I have made in almost 20 years of my distrohopping.

After installing Silverblue I configured it as usual. I installed necessary flatpaks, played with toolbox and distrobox, installed codecs, configured my bluetooth keyboard and other stuff in /etc and /var. Applied some useful tweaks I found on the web and… well… everything works. Nothing to do anymore. No issues. Nothing breaks, no dependency hell, everything runs smooth. I have nothing to tweak, tinker or configure anymore. So frustrating.

Every update is just… meh. Smooth, new, fresh system not affected by my stupid tweaking and breaking. Booooring.

I don’t have to distrohop anymore. If I want other distros I can just install them in distrobox. Other versions of apps? Something from AUR perhaps…? No problem. What’s the point of distrohopping now? Other DEs? I just rebase my system to other images with almost any DE or WM I want without losing data or messing everything up (damn you, UBlue!).

I don’t even have to reinstall the damn thing cause every time I update the system or rebase it to another image it’s like reinstalling it.

Silverblue killed distrohopping for me. Really frustrating.

  • elucubra
    11·
    5 months ago

    Two days ago my Mint system got borked by a kernel update. I booted from the grub menu with the prior kernel, and rolled back with Timeshift. Pretty painless. You don’t need Atomic/immutable distros for that sort of reliability.

    I’m playing with kinoite in a VM, though.

    • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
      3·
      5 months ago

      Depends what you break. Sure kernels are easy to fix like you mention, but what if you bork your display manager?

      • elucubra
        5·
        5 months ago

        Can’t you run timeshift from a live usb? Never tried, but i believe its possible. Obviously more time consuming and bothersome, but possible.

        • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
          2·
          5 months ago

          I actually don’t know whether timeshift can just run easily from a live USB, but I don’t see why not.

          But of course that also requires you to have installed and set up timeshift before (which is obviously a good idea)

          It’s quite a different deal when the whole operating system it built around a timeshift-like concept.