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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I can't say specifics about aurora-dx. Aurora got added to the official bluefin repo, I don't think it'll go away any time soon. https://github.com/NiHaiden/aurora if it becomes obsolete, just rebase to another atomic variant and layer your packages. It's hassle free and only one reboot (and one pin for backup) away.
You shouldn't layer any random package. You shiuld layer packages that you need and are useful for the system. Even if those are 100 packages. If you need them, you need them. Some packages can be installed via distrobox but you know that already, I guess.
How does bluefin fit in the dependency chain here - is this just the repository that builds official uBlue images?
Part of my confusion is trying to understand how these projects are related to each other
Edit - oh, I guess bluefin is the Gnome variant
If I understand it correctly, Bluefin was just the first downstream uBlue variant like Aurora that had the various goodies built into the images. Bluefin effectively being the Gnome version of Aurora. I think it was simpler to tie the Aurora builds into the existing Bluefin pipeline for generating images and packages.
I highly recommend Aurora (dx) if it sounds like it fits the bill for what you're looking for. After starting out with Kinoite and rebasing on Aurora-dx, the latter just feels like Kinoite with all of the desired additional packages already baked in, and some great additional shell scripts for convenience.
Rebasing sounded intimidating but it was literally just a simple shell command and a reboot. One additional command if you want to hang onto the previous image the way you had it. Rpm-ostree is pretty magical.