Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Their New Silverblue

[browseria]

Repeat after me: "Silverblue is not about Flatpak, Silverblue is about rpm-ostree"...

Silverblue is not about either of these exclusively. Rather, they all work hand-in-hand to bring the immutable, atomically-transacted system to the desktop. You can't do it only with rpm-ostree. You can't even do it by putting everything else in containers. Flatpak is the necessary third step in order to make a desktop system that works like this viable. That is all. I did not mean to imply otherwise. The original question however, focused on what was in it for the developer or user. os-tree is basically an operational (distro) concern, so I didn't include it in my original response.

[polarathene]

Yes this is in the same camp. Difference is being based on ostree you are not depending on BTRFS features to perform snapshot. Ostree works fine on any file system that supports hardlinking and standard set of permissions posix permissions. So xfs, ext4, BTRFS, ZFS... are all usable under ostree. Ostree exploits bind mounting to be neutral.

Basically the next step from having transactional/atomic updates is placing stuff in containers so you can update them 1 at a time without restarting system. This is where file system snapshots start to come problem as they have not always been designed with the idea that cgroup/namespace group will be mounting different snapshot versions..

Thanks for all the detailed information, really useful I also enjoyed the comparison to Snapcraft. I guess this ostree stuff(or Silverblue rather) will shine even further when Stratis arrives? Seems like an interesting direction that I look forward to seeing progress. Is Fedora the only distro using ostree like this?

[fuzz]

Please note suse usage of BTRFS snapshots and snapshoted LVM ext4 also contains a percentage of deduplication and also don't have the loopback mount nightmare

Right, I've been using BTRFS + deduplication for many, many years, especially with RAID 1 and regular scrubbing for important data. I like SUSE's approach to utilizing BTRFS, though the limited size of their default root partition is quite annoying (and extremely difficult to change properly in the installer).

Another interesting use case for BTRFS is docker support, where they use subvolumes for containers. Lots of interesting potential there.

[oiaohm]

Thanks for all the detailed information, really useful I also enjoyed the comparison to Snapcraft. I guess this ostree stuff(or Silverblue rather) will shine even further when Stratis arrives? Seems like an interesting direction that I look forward to seeing progress. Is Fedora the only distro using ostree like this?

Stratis is more attempt to handle file system level snapshoting. ostree and flatpak in combination the first as a distribution is Endless OS. Silverblue is the first to keep the normal distribution package manager and work this on top ostree. Most who have been arguing about the limitations of flatpak never looked at what Endless OS had done. Of course ostree does not forbid deb based distributions making there own deb-ostree tool.

[oiaohm]

Right, I've been using BTRFS + deduplication for many, many years, especially with RAID 1 and regular scrubbing for important data. I like SUSE's approach to utilizing BTRFS, though the limited size of their default root partition is quite annoying (and extremely difficult to change properly in the installer).

Another interesting use case for BTRFS is docker support, where they use subvolumes for containers. Lots of interesting potential there.

Its a hard question. If you don't know the file system that is going to be hosting your containers ostree can still be better. Remember ostree gives you snapshots and atomic updates without requiring very much specialised in file system. This is where Stratis will be kind of required to make file systems snapshoting more generic so its not like I cannot snapshot here because I have the wrong file system.

[rukur]

Self contained apps seem to work well with flatpak. The ones I I tried that want access to files across your system hit limits often with gets annoying fast.