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.
And good resources on how to learn to use Toolbox properly?
Toolbox create Toolbox enterNow you have a standard Fedora command line system that shares your home folder but otherwise has its own filesystem.
There’s more options (like using other distro’s), but it’s really not complicated.
To install CLI stuff that needs to access your host system’s root files, use rpm-ostree (but if you need a lot of that, use a non-immutable distro instead).
I actually use neither anymore. My stuff I actually want to work with is in home and I have no need to tinker on this system, cause it just works.
TL;DR Don’t (unless your needs are really basic or you really don’t want to layer more packages)
Distrobox ftw, its website is pretty good to find all its features and it has a neat GUI BoxBuddy too! And also the generic Pods can be useful for more advanced needs.
Extra tip: if you have more time to spend on learning, I think Nix Home Manager will actually be the better solution in the long run, no need to worry about containers breaking in some way after system updates with scattered solutions that are hard to understand and remember, also you get to bring your configuration anywhere