Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine) [LWN.net]

Fedora Magazine has announced the creation of Fedora Atomic Desktops: a way of branding Fedora's growing set of rpm-ostree spins. Joseph Gayso wrote "we’ve seen more of our mainline Fedora Linux spins make the jump to offer a version that implements rpm-ostree. It’s reached the point where it can be hard to talk about all of them at the same time. Therefore we’ve introduced a new brand that will serve to simplify how we discuss rpm-ostree and how we name future atomic spins." LWN covered Project Bluefin, which is based on Fedora's rpm-ostree work, in December 2023.

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Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 10, 2024 8:43 UTC (Sat) by rgb (guest, #57129) [Link] (8 responses)

Immutable systems like these might be sensible for people who mainly use their computer like a Chromebook, e.g. do everything in the browser or in a few select applications that are well supported. (Yes I am thinking of you mom.) But as a general purpose desktop for developers they seem much more clunky then NixOS for example without any real benefits in comparison. But if someone finds them suitable for a particular use case I would like to hear from you. Since it's all about containers I guess it will be something in that realm. It's basically a container fever dream. What if everything would be a container? If that thought get's you excited then you know what to do.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 10, 2024 10:45 UTC (Sat) by fvbever (subscriber, #135658) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't really see how these are different from NixOS, immutable base and atomic updates. I recently played around with Fedora iot which uses the same technology and I had no problems installing packages.

I'm currently looking at these immutable distros for a project at work where we need to build an appliance but can't really get away with using a dedicated embedded build system. This was originally a Microsoft shop, so the fact that I can easily get a desktop up and running on there will be a net benefit to support developers with less experience using Linux.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 10, 2024 22:16 UTC (Sat) by champtar (subscriber, #128673) [Link] (1 responses)

Shipping an appliance based on Alma 8 + rpm-ostree for a year now, I really enjoy it. I do patch the ISO install a bit, the most important being to force checking the checksum, as this caught at least 5 cases of ISO corrupted during transfer.

Being able to run 'ostree fsck' avoids looking for bugs due to corruption (or people going crazy and patching the system without telling). Then you have 'ostree admin config-diff' so you know all the changed files in /etc (again big time saver).

To be rpm-ostree compatible your rpm must not do data migration in pre/post install, because during the install the rpm doesn't have access to the data.

For the UI we use cockpit + custom pages, which might be enough depending on your needs.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 11, 2024 9:11 UTC (Sun) by fvbever (subscriber, #135658) [Link]

That's super interesting, we've done a bunch of evaluation and came to the same conclusion you have. We haven't decided yet if we're going with RHEL proper or some RPM based derivative. Are you using image-builder by any chance? That's the part I'm trying to figure out right now.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 10, 2024 20:37 UTC (Sat) by tvannahl (guest, #134292) [Link] (1 responses)

Trying to give you my personal appeal for Fedora Atomic, hoping to provide one position.

I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue (Atomic Desktop) for a couple of years now. The main reason for me are the fast upgrades, SELinux and a familiar position to vanilla packages and upstream first. Additionally the appeal to me is, that I find the concepts quite useful at the server.

I was ready at one point to install NixOS - what I found has been about a DSL and “more a package manager + language than OS“. May be interesting but did not catch me as it did sound like a steep learning curve and not relevant for servers to me.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 11, 2024 10:22 UTC (Sun) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

Each to their own, of course, and I wouldn't quibble much about the learning curve. But, I do run nixos servers and desktops. I actually think it's better for servers than desktops.

That said, I've never used this ostree stuff so I can't offer any comparison.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 11, 2024 12:38 UTC (Sun) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link]

I use it on one of my main two systems right now (next to an Arch desktop I haven't migrated yet) and have yet to come across something I couldn't do.

I personally steer away from toolbx/distrobox as my way of installing additional packages not available or suitable for Flatpak but use Nix Home Manager instead. So basically I have just fedora Silverblue with very few layered packages (RPM Fusion and the WiFi driver requiring it, and adw-gtk3 and dconf-editor). Then a *lot* of GUI apps in Flatpaks. And all my CLI tools are maintained through my home.nix flake configuration which is really just a list of packages I need. This is really nice because this declarative style improves config sharing across systems even more (even b/w my macOS work system also with Nix HM and my private fedora!).

For development purposes I use dev containers, i.e., small, yes, containers that contain all the build tools required. Be it Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript, Haskell or even Pandoc for document preparation. This is especially neat for Haskell, Python and TypeScript since they are all rather peculiar about the right version and I'm not always working on just my projects but projects from others who aren't strictly careful about backwards compat or such like.

Either way, this allows me to keep my development environments rather neatly separated with no huge $PATH containing a lot of cruft, I can easily move to a new device because there's almost no setup involved. All in all a quite neat experience. There are *some* papercuts for sure, but nothing a developer shouldn't be able to solve.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 11, 2024 12:43 UTC (Sun) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link]

> Immutable systems like these might be sensible for people who mainly use their computer like a Chromebook, e.g. do everything in the browser or in a few select applications that are well supported. (Yes I am thinking of you mom.)

Indeed, it works very well for this purpose. Thanks to tools from Matt Devillier (aka mrchromebox) I was able to repurpose some EoL Chromebooks that stopped getting updates and install Kinoite instead. There is of course Silverblue if you prefer Gnome and several other spins. These are perfect for school homework and web stuff, and hassle free.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Feb 12, 2024 1:31 UTC (Mon) by spmfox (subscriber, #125241) [Link]

I got hooked on Silverblue because of the update system. I started running Silverblue on underpowered cheap laptops and was astonished on how fast rpm-ostree works even on s l o w storage. It took less then 5 minutes total to upgrade from Fedora 38->39 on a Celeron laptop. It was faster than DNF on my 16 thread "real" laptop.

Recently I've converted even my main system to Silverblue - I was worried that I "wouldn't be able to get real work done" however that has just not been the case. Everything installed via Flatpak, and for things I cant find they can be installed via toolbox. I've recently discovered toolbox can run GUI apps too - so literally I'm missing out on nothing.

My main use case was for family computers, rpm-ostree and Flatpak doing auto updates, it "just works". For everything else I've needed, toolbox works great. I've even started using other distros in toolbox as well. I know distrobox is a thing but I've never needed anything more advanced.

There have been a few gotchas, some complications with using NFS the way I've been doing it for years or sometimes printing with Flatpaks is problematic - and because Firefox is baked-in and not a Flatpak that's caused problems too. All easy enough to work around, just different.

To all the people making the "its all containers" = complex argument - technically I suppose so but for every day use case my family never notices the difference and honestly it's never got in my way and I've switched full time about a year ago from standard to Silverblue. Cant recommend it enough. If you've ever used a Flatpak before, then its no different.

My biggest failure was believing it would limit me from "really using" my system but it has not at all.