Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops (Fedora Magazine)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.