{"title":"Fedora Silverblue","url":"https://seanbehan.ca/posts/silverblue","description":"Why an atomic rpm-ostree desktop stuck: updates that check out like git, and roll back the same way.","author":"Sean Behan","published":"2021-02-13T20:21:43.000Z","updated":null,"draft":false,"tags":["linux"],"readingMinutes":2,"image":null,"sections":[{"id":"introduction","text":"Introduction","level":2},{"id":"atomic-updates-and-rollbacks","text":"Atomic Updates and Rollbacks","level":2},{"id":"toolbox-for-development","text":"Toolbox for Development","level":2},{"id":"rebasing-and-customization","text":"Rebasing and Customization","level":2}],"content_format":"text/markdown","content_url":"https://seanbehan.ca/posts/silverblue.md","content":"### Introduction\n\nOver the past few months I experimented with some new Linux distributions. Here\n\nI'll show you the one I'm currently using and why I think it's great.\n\n![Fedora Silverblue desktop screenshot](https://seanbehan.ca/img/20210213_15h31m29s_grim.webp)\n\n### Atomic Updates and Rollbacks\n\nFedora Silverblue is what's known as an Atomic operating system. On Fedora\n\nSilverblue every update is checked out similar to how git checks out a new\n\nreference. If you want to install packages into the base image you can use\n\nrpm-ostree install like you usually would, the only difference is that you need\n\nto reboot to boot into your new base system reference.\n\n### Toolbox for Development\n\nIf you don't want to reboot there is a better way though. Instead of layering\n\npackages into your base image you can use a tool called toolbox which is simply\n\na wrapper around podman for creating containers with the current Fedora image.\n\nYou can use toolbox enter and install and run any software as well as access\n\nfiles inside your home directory.\n\n### Rebasing and Customization\n\nIf at some point you do updates and your system doesn't boot, you don't have to\n\nworry. You can simply reboot and choose the last working base image and your\n\nsystem will boot up as normal, allowing you to fix any breakage.\n\nSilverblue is so much more powerful than that though. You can rebase your\n\nentire system on different base images or Fedora versions. Now instead of\n\ninstalling your new desktop environment and risk breaking your operating system\n\nyou can do an `rpm-ostree rebase` and rebase on another desktop environment. I\n\nused this to rebase on an image from\n\n[Kinoite](https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/) called\n\nbase which just includes all the base packages and no desktop environment. Then\n\nI installed my window manager of choice and it's dependencies. Now I have a\n\nfully modular Fedora installation along with [Sway](https://swaywm.org/) and\n\nall the dependencies I need to use it.\n"}