Fedora Had A Killer 2018, But It Will Be Interesting To See What Comes Next Year

[re:fi.64]

Silverblue is only for Developers.

[I]Fedora Silverblue[/I] is an immutable desktop operating system. Aiming at good support for container-focused workflows, this variant of Fedora Workstation targets developer communities.

There's a difference between "targets" and "only for". Once more polished/complete, Silverblue is slated to become the new default Workstation variant. rpm-ostree's atomic upgrades and easy rollbacks are great (should also make automatic updates fast and easy without any risks), and Flatpaks are best for user-facing applications anyway.

[Candy]

Silverblue is slated to become the new default Workstation variant.

You can be sure that, once this happens, that Fedora will drop down in the distrowatch statistics, because no one will ever want to use this. And please stop repeating this nonsenese with using words like "flatpaks" and "risk" and so on, in one sentence. It has yet to learned and investigated, whether flatpaks are really easy, risk-free and easy roolback as you state.

I already saw a big drop of contributors and supporters within Fedora (you only need to active follow the development mailing list). Most of them don't express for why they leave, because no one wants to start a flamewar there. But you can be sure, that most of it is either time related or related to the direction Fedora is leading. People seek consistency in what they use. They want a conservative - but yet with new tools - distribution. Easy to update, easy to use and everything should - if possible - be applyable with their existing skills of installing a system. People are sick of experiments that change faster than they could settle with the last installation they've done.

Flatpaks are a huge mess by todays definition. A Linux distribution installed inside a Linux distribution. Cluttering the entire /var/lib directory with a sub-installation of said Linux inside a Linux. Taking up yet another huge amount of space for no benefit.

[re:fi.64]

Apologizing in advance for the some of the quotes getting messed up. The Phoronix message editor doesn't play nicely with Android...

You can be sure that, once this happens, that Fedora will drop down in the distrowatch statistics, because no one will ever want to use this. And please stop repeating this nonsenese with using words like "flatpaks" and "risk" and so on, in one sentence. It has yet to learned and investigated, whether flatpaks are really easy, risk-free and easy roolback as you state.

For rollbacks, I was more referring to OSTree. The main thing of risk I mentioned is that they can be updated, and any application instances will continue using the old version until they're closed and re-opened (or decide to do so automatically). This essentially means that all the problems related to files changing under an application while it's running are gone. Also, if the systems crashes or reboots during an update, whether it be of Flatpaks or the system itself, there is no concern over having a halfway-done update that can mess up your system.

I already saw a big drop of contributors and supporters within Fedora (you only need to active follow the development mailing list). Most of them don't express for why they leave, because no one wants to start a flamewar there. But you can be sure, that most of it is either time related or related to the direction Fedora is leading.

Do you have any evidence for this other than simply guessing? I've only ever seen time-related ones: for many contributors that have been with Fedora for a long time, working on a distro simply gets tiring.

People seek consistency in what they use. They want a conservative - but yet with new tools - distribution. Easy to update, easy to use and everything should - if possible - be applyable with their existing skills of installing a system. People are sick of experiments that change faster than they could settle with the last installation they've done.

Out of curiosity, who is "people" here? I understand you're included, but not everyone feels this way. In fact, quite a few people have been using Silverblue as their daily driver since it was still in early beta, some even when it was still "Atomic Workstation".

Flatpaks are a huge mess by todays definition. A Linux distribution installed inside a Linux distribution. Cluttering the entire /var/lib directory with a sub-installation of said Linux inside a Linux. Taking up yet another huge amount of space for no benefit.

Not really... The common runtimes, combined with OSTree de-duplication, eliminate a lot of redundant application files. In general, there's not really another way with Linux in its current state to have cross-distro applications. As a Linux app developer, the fact that I can make a Flatpak that works everywhere without having to deal with distro-specific bugs is amazing.

[arakan94]

stupid is to use a security related software developed by nsa.

Why? Questionable policies doesn't mean that the end product is bad. SELinux is actually very good and managed to protect its users from at least several high-profile weaknesses. IMHO, SELinux, or something similar (though AppArmor is inadequate) should be integral part of any Linux system that claims to focus on security.