Fedora Had A Stellar 2021 & Continued Running At The Forefront Of Linux Innovations

[Quackdoc]

What makes it an atrocity? I use it as my main desktop and am very happy with it.

working with it is terrible. RPM-ostree and Toolbox are NOT a good design. while in theory it's nice, but I constantly found myself fighting with it. I think toolbox itself is a decent utility. but the implementation of it as it stands is terrible. I'm not sure what the fix is. but if it does become default without fixing that I can't see myself ever coming to like silverblue, even if I really do like the idea of it.

[birdie]

On the other hand, the default Kernel configuration is way slower than other distributions in games and even from the whole boot process and desktop usage, it feels way slower than others

On the other hand Rawhide enables quite a lot of debugging for the Linux kernel which doesn't come cheap. You can perfectly use the kernel from Fedora 35 with Rawhide which is plenty fast.

[Candy]

You can perfectly use the kernel from Fedora 35 with Rawhide which is plenty fast.

Or you enable the fedora-rawhide-kernel-nodebug repository and go with that

[jacob]

working with it is terrible. RPM-ostree and Toolbox are NOT a good design. while in theory it's nice, but I constantly found myself fighting with it. I think toolbox itself is a decent utility. but the implementation of it as it stands is terrible. I'm not sure what the fix is. but if it does become default without fixing that I can't see myself ever coming to like silverblue, even if I really do like the idea of it.

I've had no issues whatsoever with rpm-ostree. To the contrary once I got my head around its workflows I found it really nice and can't see myself going back to a conventional package manager.

Regarding toolbox I agree that at the moment it's not as good as it should be. My main gripe with it is that it's really minimal and way too simplistic for many use cases. There are always workarounds or other ways to achieve what I need but it really should evolve and mature before it can be called a Silverblue selling point.

So I take its limitations as a Silverblue pain point. Every distro has some and usually they are not bad enough to force one to change distros, same here. The other advantages of Silverblue are well worth it IMO.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I've had no issues whatsoever with rpm-ostree. To the contrary once I got my head around its workflows I found it really nice and can't see myself going back to a conventional package manager.

Regarding toolbox I agree that at the moment it's not as good as it should be. My main gripe with it is that it's really minimal and way too simplistic for many use cases. There are always workarounds or other ways to achieve what I need but it really should evolve and mature before it can be called a Silverblue selling point.

So I take its limitations as a Silverblue pain point. Every distro has some and usually they are not bad enough to force one to change distros, same here. The other advantages of Silverblue are well worth it IMO.

The biggest problem with Toolbox is that the main developer has his head lodged firmly up his own ass and isn't thinking about things from a product perspective or listening to user feedback (seems to be a thing for RH). Two extremely logical requests keep coming up repeatedly and he keeps closing the issues.

1. If you are going to live your life through containers, it seems obvious that you'd want a simple (optional) way to create them without bind mounting your real $HOME so you could easily throw them away and not have to deal with everything you installed shitting all over your home directory (or from a security standpoint, having the container be able to read your entire home directory).
2. Better (optional) integration with GUI apps in containers. People keep asking for some way to export .desktop launchers without the tedious task of doing it manually. His answer is "use Flatpaks". No shit buddy, what about the 99% of GUI apps that aren't packaged as Flatpaks? Hell, even a bunch of the ones that are packaged are from some randos on the internet.

   flatpak search bitwarden

   Oh cool, Bitwarden is available as a Flatpak? What's that, it's not actually from the authors? I'm going to trust random dudes who wrote some wrapper around the AppImage with all my passwords? Hard pass. Oh and Flatpak has no way of even showing you if the person who published the app is the upstream maintainer.

It's honestly super frustrating because the important underlying bits of technology are essentially ready right now. But there's a bunch of easy to solve polish like the items above that they seem to have zero interest in providing. I feel like Red Hat has a huge opportunity they will squander because they have no actual product management.

[risho]

i totally agree with your 2 toolbox criticisms. they are a super big pain in the ass. while not optimal, fortunately there are workarounds for both of these issues. i definitely agree that they both need to be addressed since they are incredibly obvious and incredibly basic features that basically everyone who would use toolbox would want.

another obvious usecase that isn't being properly met by toolbox is proper support for non-fedora containers. you can hack your way around it to create an incredibly subpar experience but solid out of the box support for at the very least debian should be expected. it would be an amazing super sick killer feature if you could have fedora silverblue as a bulletproof base and then could get crazy and reckless inside of an arch container using the aur and all of that stuff. or inside of an ubuntu container if you want to test against that or have software that only properly runs in ubuntu.

toolbox as it is is still incredibly awesome and useful, but lacking these additional features is a real bummer. they are really missing an opportunity to take something that is already great and making it fantastic.

fortunately there are already alternatives popping up all over the place. tlbx and distrobox being 2 such examples.

[You-]

[*]If you are going to live your life through containers, it seems obvious that you'd want a simple (optional) way to create them without bind mounting your real $HOME so you could easily throw them away and not have to deal with everything you installed shitting all over your home directory (or from a security standpoint, having the container be able to read your entire home directory).

Toolbox is pretty much a podman container with the users $HOME mounted. If you need the container without the $HOME, surely just use podman? Maybe I havent used toolbox enough, but if its integrations are too much, going bare bones is podman.

Toolbox doesn't replace podman. It is a convenience tool on top of it. I get why people ask for that feature, but unless I am missing something, the correct response should be "use podman directly".

[masinick]

I have difficulty understanding any "strong language" regarding the state of any of the major Linux distributions. I can appreciate that each of us has particular preferences, and that's why there are so many different choices available. While on occasion a new release of a particular distribution introduces temporary defects, the majority of distributions, and definitely Fedora, have tremendously improved over the course of their history. It's pretty rare these days when something won't install or work at all; generally speaking, the overall quality of today's Linux distributions is something to applaud, especially since the majority of distributions offer freely available, downloadable software. I can understand someone being upset about a proprietary product that costs a lot of money; you deserve satisfaction. In free software, there is still quality at the cost of the network service and equipment used only.

Regarding either mobile or desktop software, I'm very happy with free download features in both categories; I don't understand or appreciate the concern, but there certainly are other alternatives available for both. Meanwhile, I recently installed a download image of Fedora 35 in Xfce desktop respin form. It downloaded easily, installed cleanly and worked fine immediately - both Live and following a subsequent installation. No issues here.