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.
Wouldn’t help, because any changes I make would be wiped out on the next update (plus it kind of defeats the purpose of an immutable system). I don’t want to go down that road, primarily because the maintenance needs to be as easy as clicking a button (I’m not the only user, so ease of use is necessary).
The better option would be to have it live in the filesystem overlay, but I can’t seem to get that to work. It’s possible that it could be a flatpak, as ProtonVPN has their client as a flatpak, but PIA doesn’t seem all that interested in throwing any bones to Linux users.