Fedora Atomic Desktops Born Out Of Fedora Silverblue Success

[spicfoo]

So for personal clarification....is Canonical's Ubuntu Core their version of an immutable OS built around Snaps even down to snapping the kernel, as opposed to however Red Hat is engineering Atomic Desktops ?

And is this the future of Linux desktops going forward ? Seems a lot like ChromeOS-ification of Linux. Not saying that's a good or bad thing. Just observing.

I wouldn't be surprised if noone here remembers this but Chrome OS came out with this concept much later than Red Hat. Red Hat just called it Stateless Linux back in 2004 and there was some movement towards it in early 2004. It took years of work on the kernel (device mapper, fscrypt..), filesystems (squashfs, fs snapshots, composefs..) and user space tooling (systemd, ostree, flatpak..) by a bunch of companies including Red Hat and Google to finalize realize it much later.

[User29]

another article without real explanation of the topic, or any insight or useful detail.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Success? If it was a success, then there wouldn't be something new. I've never had the feeling that someone actually used it. Maybe from the entire userbase only 1-2%. The rest probably went Workstation, Xfce4 or netinstall something.

Interestingly, for the ~80% of the population with general computing needs, I think the Atomic offerings are getting really close to being a great fit. Updates are automatic. They get their software from a nice GUI app store (for GNOME and KDE). Their apps have some further element of sandboxing / isolation.

Now what about Phoronix readers? For many in these forums these immutable desktops are a big pain in the ass. Any out of tree drivers are generally more annoying to deal with. The Fedora Atomic options don't and won't ever support DKMS. Many people here want to tinker in ways that don't align with the goals of immutable desktops. But we need to remember that we aren't that 80% of general computer users. Immutable desktops could dominate the overall landscape even if we aren't interested.

[patrick1946]

So for personal clarification....is Canonical's Ubuntu Core their version of an immutable OS built around Snaps even down to snapping the kernel, as opposed to however Red Hat is engineering Atomic Desktops ?

And is this the future of Linux desktops going forward ? Seems a lot like ChromeOS-ification of Linux. Not saying that's a good or bad thing. Just observing.

I use Silverblue since somw time and really like the division into the rock solid base system and the toolboxes for work.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Hey, as long as Debian comes up with an apt-ostree so I'm not being yanked along by Fedora's eagerness to drop support for aging hardware and they hammer out a solution to Flatpak's design being so hostile to end-user patching of installed files (eg. a post-update hook), I'm all for it.

One of the big reasons I use an LTS+Flatpak combo is that I want to be easily and reliably able to rollback if an update introduces a bug (Flatpak) and, for the things I don't do that with, I want them to be "pinned at a version where I know what the bugs are and I'm used to working around them".

Having a non-containerized alternative to Flatpak without Snap's architectural misdesigns would mean I wouldn't be stuck on stale versions of things like Dolphin and Konsole with known bugs for years at a time (eg. the fix for "ejecting an optical drive can crash Dolphin" didn't make it into Kubuntu 22.04 LTS) because I consider it more acceptable than having to deal with updates I can't trivially roll back if I don't like them.

Have you thought about Tumbleweed or Slowroll from OpenSUSE? You get all the new stuff + easy rollbacks out of the box.

[Snaipersky]

another article without real explanation of the topic, or any insight or useful detail.

Fedora is dropping the asinine set of names for their immutable variants (silverblue, kinoite, geode, etc.) and switching to something you can actually understand (Atomic KDE Desktop, Atomic Budgie Desktop, etc). It's all there in the article.

[Snaipersky]

Have you thought about Tumbleweed or Slowroll from OpenSUSE? You get all the new stuff + easy rollbacks out of the box.

It is utterly baffling that SuSE's update system isn't the default for basically everything everywhere. No in-flight packages, no lengthy rollbacks if something broke, it's always in a known good state, or a quick reboot away. I hate having a windows work laptop that has to rollback updates every month for 1-2 hours, and having infrastructure for restoring server system images that one has to submit requests to and wait for hours. Make a subvolume, commit changes, reboot. If something went bad, you're out a minute of your time.

[ssokolow]

Have you thought about Tumbleweed or Slowroll from OpenSUSE? You get all the new stuff + easy rollbacks out of the box.

The last time I considered changing distros, I was on a CPU from 2011 where all I could focus on was that people always wound up retreating to "it's fast enough" stances when I started asking about whether RPM-related tooling was as snappy on slow hardware as APT tools were.

I have mixed feelings about OpenSUSE, since they're better than Red Hat about providing good-quality equivalents for things like packages.debian.org, but I'm still not sure I want to learn a whole new UI and workflow.

I suppose, now that I have a brand new PC while my old 2011-CPU'd machine is still fully intact, I could ease myself into being comfortable with OpenSUSE without either fiddling around with a VM or switching over my daily driver cold-turkey.

[user1]

It is utterly baffling that SuSE's update system isn't the default for basically everything everywhere. No in-flight packages, no lengthy rollbacks if something broke, it's always in a known good state, or a quick reboot away. I hate having a windows work laptop that has to rollback updates every month for 1-2 hours, and having infrastructure for restoring server system images that one has to submit requests to and wait for hours. Make a subvolume, commit changes, reboot. If something went bad, you're out a minute of your time.

If you talk about btrfs snapshots as the rollback system compared to something like Timeshift or whatever Windows has, then yes, they're miles ahead. However, they have a major drawback, and it's the absurd amount of disk space they take.

[elatllat]

The argument for immutable seems flawed to me.