I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue on my desktop and laptop for the past, what, five years? Silverblue is Fedora’s main atomic variant, a spiritual counterpart to Fedora Workstation. I also make niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. In other words, a core system component that you cannot properly test from inside a container or VM—you really want it directly on the host. So, why would I choose an… immutable distro? How does that even work?
↫ Ivan Molodetskikh
That’s a great question, and as immutable or immutable-like Linux distributions become more popular and widespread – and eventually the default download option for many distributions, I’m sure – articles like these are quite important. I’m sure quite a few developers discarded the idea of using something like Silverblue because they assumed it wouldn’t be fit for purpose, but if the developer of Niri makes it work, I’m fairly sure anybody can.
It’s always interesting to me to see how other people work with their machines, and what setups they use.
As a Bazzite user (Bazzite is based on the same exact technologies, with a different set of preinstalled packages tailored for hw acceleration and gaming) I found this post extremely interesting. I learned new ways to interact with my OS and will surely take some of them into action in the near future. In particular, I was not aware of the possibility of making the immutable file system ‘transiently’ writable in order to make experiments. Very cool stuff!
The rpm-ostree base is difficult to use (build and repo) and is really in line to be replaced with the bootc system. Same underlying ostree base, but bootc builds and OCI repositories.
Also, the NIRI dev should have a look at https://github.com/zirconium-dev/zirconium , a mature bootc based build that focuses on niri and dms. I’ve been using it for about 6 months and find it pretty stable.
OCI builds are nice ’cause you can extend them easier with container builds (docker or podman) easily. It’s really the way to go.