Silverblue vs uBlue
Silverblue vs uBlue
I’m considering trying out an immutable distro after using Tumbleweed for the last 6 years.
The two major options for me seem to be Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora-dx
My understanding is that universal-blue is a downstream of Fedora Atomic
So, the points in favor of Kinoite is sticking closer to upstream, however it seems like I would need to layer quite a few packages. My understanding is that this is discouraged in an rpm-ostree setup, particularly due to update time and possible mismatches with RPMFusion
uBlue Aurora-dx seems to include a lot of the additional support I’d need - ROCm, distrobox, virt-manager, libratbag, media codecs, etc. however I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term
I’m curious what the community thinks between the two as a viable option
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Short answer: use uBlue.
Longer answer:
Even though uBlue is technically "downstream", it also isn't. uBlue builds its' packages automatically, and you are never more than a few hours (1 day max for huge updates) away from upstream. It feels more like "sidestream" (if that word exists?).
One reason it exists is, as you already said, because layering takes quite some time.
At least I personally don't wanna use stock Fedora (Atomic) and would install some codecs, tweaks and such anyway, and uBlue does that already for me.
Update time doesn't matter anymore for me, because uBlue updates itself automatically in the background. Silverblue doesn't do that afaik.Depending on how "custom" your system should be, you can take a look at the uBlue builder, where you can create your own image based on already existing ones if you like.
The cool thing about Fedora Atomic is, that you don't have to stick to anything. If you don't like something anymore, you can rebase in less than two minutes without any hassle and jump from image to image, no matter if it's an official one (e.g. Silverblue) or some obscure uBlue image.
I’ve got Silverblue installed on my laptop, could I then rebase to uBlue and get the benefits of using uBlue over Silverblue?
Yep, you would just run a couple of commands in a terminal which would reset your layered apps and rebase to a ublue build of your choosing: