Fedora Silverblue could be the future! 

Things to do after installing Fedora Silverblue: by Karl Schneider Step 1: Open Firefox and navigate to ru-vid.com Step 2: Watch the video titled "Fedora Silverblue 30 could be the future!" Tip: Be sure to take notes. Step 3: Click "Like" (AKA: the Thumbs Up icon) Step 4: Click "Share" and share the video on any and all of your favorite social media platforms Step 5: Watch the video titled "Silverblue 2-week update and answers" -- again, take notes Step 6: Smash that "Like" icon Step 7: Repeat step 4! Step 8: Click the Patreon link on the DorianDotSlash RU-vid home page (patreon.com), search DorianDotSlash, then choose a monthly payment amount, because you didn't have to research any of this and it was presented to you in a way that even I could understand. Tip: An easy way to calculate the proper amount is to think of the amount of money you spend on stupid, unneeded and/or unhealthy crap each month. Multiply that number by 1.... That number is your monthly pledge. And you will be happier and healthier! Step 9: Read through the notes you took and have at it! You are now one of the first to be computing like everyone will be in the future. You are essentially Marty McFly.

The need to reboot over and over will make Windows users feel right at home.

Layers, Flatpak, Toolbox, lol, you just described Ikea... haha

Wow! I really like the direction Fedora is going. It isn't just your typical distro that's for sure. They obviously put a lot of thought into the underlying structure of the OS and how Flatpacks and RPM's are integrated. Your video really explained a lot in a very concise manner. Thanks for all your hard work. I will certainly download and play around with Silverblue. Aloha!

Just to clarify for those worried about disk space with the image updates : When you download a new updated image layer of the OS, you are only downloading the CHANGES to the image you have now, and you're not downloading an entire new image. Imagine this is like GIT for your operating system. Apologies for not making it clear. I'm planning on update videos with further details on OSTree and Toolbox.

Excellent video. I think you explained Silverblue very well. Thx for making the video.

After a couple of installs I was able to get my entire setup without a single rpm-ostree install. I really hope this will be super stable

Dude, this video is great. You do a great job explaining and demonstrating Silverblue. Now I'm going to load it up on my test rig.

Really cool! I love the granularity and containment. Seems reasonably secure.

This and your nix video inspired me to try a silverblue + nix setup. No containers, no need to layer packages. But still fedora (point release, more stable) and could install some proprietary RPMs that sometimes i have to.

Very well explained. Tried on a VM and worked (minus cinnamon) . Subscribed!

Thank you DorianDotSlash for this informative video. Because of you and babyWOGUE, I'm completely sold on Silverblue. I do believe now that this (OSTree+Containers) is the future for Linux. Hope other distros follow suit.

Just spent a bit of time watching the vid, and I have to say I love the idea on how silverblue has been implemented for the most part. Since it sounds more "image" based than a traditional distro or OS, it would make it dead easy to fix problems when they occur, and it would give some users confidence that unless they have a hardware fault, they're not going to have a "broken" computer. At least, that's my take on it.

Better a long video with this well explained then short and bad explained;)

Very cool! So are your NixOS videos. Thanks!

Interesting and impressive... thx. Containers have around for a while but this cranks it up a notch. I can see why you would think this is the future for workstations.

This seems really cool....One of the biggest issues I have had when trying to see if I could use Linux as my main OS is it's seemingly random self destruction sometimes after trying to run package or OS updates that that the OS itself has prompted me to run...I have tried about 5 serious times to see if I could replace Windows with Linux...The cycle goes like this..1: Curiosity....2: Carefully taking the time to research which one of the brazillion distros out there would be best for me...3: Install it onto it's own partition....4: Fight and struggle to get drivers so I can get everything to work properly.....5: Start to customize to my liking......6: Get to where I am thinking that maybe I *could* use it full time....7: Run random update which breaks everything.....8: Get frustrated and give up on Linux for a while...Rinse and repeat....Going to try this out now..I am hoping this will install to a VirtualBox machine so I can test it out without too many headaches...Here I go again :)

great vid and gives lot of insight into fedora silverblue

Thank you SO much for this concise explanation! You make it look easy! P.S. LOVE the AMIIBIOS w/ E8400...ahh, the memories :-)

This might make me switch to Fedora... Awesome! :D

Nice overview. I really like SilverBlue. Not sure if it'll wind up being "the future," but this is definitely a cool new approach and relatively straight forward to work with. I agree about the inadequate documentation. So far so good. I'm going to keep it running for a while.

This is actually similar somewhat to how enterprise network routers work. The operating system image is a self-contained binary that is deflated onto the file system/memory. A second storage media is then used to store all user generated data. For that matter, that's how Android phones also handle data as well!

great video, I switched to Ubuntu on my 12 year old computer, now it works great again, lightning fast. Some friends are considering installing Linux, I think this version you present is perfect, we would skip the "terminal" parts as were newbies on Linux and not power users, just need browser, word processor and excel type program.

this seems the way to go... especially since the image updates contain only the delta's keeping the original as a read-only fallback

Thank you, Dorian. Very well explained.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I've been wondering exactly how Silverblue is put together.

Great video; fascinating, educational and superbly presented. Thank you.

Thanks for the video you explained things very well indeed, shall give it a test drive so to speak

Wonderful video. Wonderful product. I've been a PC tech for 35+ yrs and a Linux enthusiast for 10. My dream has been to install an OS on a client machine that is stable, modular, upgradeable, and crashproof -- in other words, putting me out of a job. After dealing with Windows BSODs, Windows OS Bloat, Ubuntu PPA hell, great QC with Ubuntu 18.04, and BAD QC with 20.04, I'm ready for a change. After just 2 days of playing w/ SilverBlue 32, I'm already hooked. I like separating partitions so I'm using 1 GB /boot, 32 GB / and the remainder as /var -- all formatted EXT4. It seems to work great. btw, I boot BIOS not UEFI on this old machine.

Tnx for a great video, really shows what Silverblue is and how to use it.

Great video Dorian! looks very interesting!!

Really great video man, maybe this is not the linux future but I'm pretty sure is the fedora future and my future system too.

I've been using Yocto build system at work for our wearable platform. The way the OS is maintained looks similar. This looks more flexible with the package layers but the whole idea of the OS being static and immutable is the same. As a platform manager working like this makes updating the OS and regression very easy. Looks like they have taken the Yocto concept to the desktop. Very interested. P.s. Great video. :)

He did an excellent job explaining. If u ever wonder why this is important, try upgrading windows often. Eventually, u will have a disaster where you have to reinstall windows and lose all your files unless you extremely experienced. Or try installing Nvidia cuda on fedora. With the packages fighting each other, it's often easier to just reinstall fedora than trying to fix it. In theory this just let's you simply go back to when everything is working.

Thanks Dorian, nice presentation!

Great video! You answered many of my questions about Silver Blue. It really is a fantastic concept! On a different note, I noticed a lot of screen tearing when you moved your windows around. What's the deal with that? Now, I have an AMD Radeon RX 590. I'm presuming that I would be okay all around, right? Are there any caveats with any typical devices that work on normal Linux, but have issues on Silver Blue?

This is crazy! This is like me dd a live cd image to one like distro sized usb partition and having a second writable ex4 partition for use files and installs.. but now it is a OFFICIAL thing! I remember reading about this on Amiga OS with a ROM based GUI based Amiga OS kickstart. The real OS is the ROM kickstart(IMAGE), and the OS is on a harddrive(user files and installable apps).If all failed, reboot to the kickstart, or live cd(in Linux world),etc. This is what I have wanted since I started using computers with Windows 95!! A read only stable OS that does not crash and force you to reformat a hard drive.. AHHHH! Now I see this as the future lol! I assume this is the case because of SSD short life spans and Linux traditional installs WILL kill the limited write cycle cheap nand chips on MOST retail and cheap chinese SSD drives every one is buying now. Less writes, less fails of nand flash cells.

i really support their idea, and it helps devs fix bugs a lot easier by just using same 'commit' image

It looks like fedora is the Windows of the Linux world. Every update requires a reboot.

So, before all this, and before containers and stateless and immutable, I had ONE way to tell what was installed in a system. If I was doing things right, rpm -qa or yum list installed would show me ALL packages and I had a very clear idea of what each thing was. Now, and correct me if I am wrong, there is the image version, plus then packages on that image, plus flatpack plus whatever is running on those toolboxes to track. That, plus the sheer amount of overlapping between tools and systems makes me wonder if we are really going into the right direction. Life is not immutable or stateless. Why do we model computing systems in such an unnatural way? We still have to make each system different. Why complicate it artificially?

*Note for UEFI Users:* If installing SilverBlue (32) on an UEFI machine, it is done automatically, effortlessly! Secureboot setup, PK, KEK, keys & DB, DBx lists are all concatenated with the proper setup *while retaining the old hashes needed for loading your other OS's. I have both an encrypted OS with USB key access in the back of the same drive I installed Silverblue on, and a second drive with W10. Silverblue didn't prompt me about the UEFI stuff, and installed itself in seamless fashion despite my password protected UEFI setup with secure boot enabled, and legacy disabled. It is a better executed "UEFI Stub" loader install than the "Sakaki's UEFI Gentoo Tutorial" based setup I fiddled with for a week, and the best I've seen on any distro I've tried so far. It just works. Edit: After trying to do the whole left shift key boot thing, it does odd stuff and definitely does not have a grub menu. For me it tried to do something with my W10 drive, an HDD. I never like hearing that thing spin up when I'm on a linux distro. It's my audible alarm that something is wrong. I've learned to assume it's due to a network security hole as checking available drives is often a first order of business. Hearing that drive spin sends me into panic pull the Ethernet cable and check the logs mode.

This idea was on the Atari ST in 1985 - it had the OS on a ROM making it immutable and fast (essentially solid state in the 80s)! You could supplement it with software to create a more featured desktop environment, a bit like a layer, which could always be removed.

This looks like a royal PITA compared to traditional packages for things that aren't flatpaks yet.

Thanks

Thank you for sharing what you learned. This is really awesome. I'm on Windows primarily, but I have always envisioned that something like this should be developed. Because I'd like to do VMWare on something on my primary system, then I can revert back to a prior Win ver before updates ... because the updates do break things. Even now, I'm bitching about my display drivers being screwy after last update and my monitor is (somehow) overscanned my screen layout and all around is a little off display. But, more and more, I'm thinking about moving to Linux. Or, at least, using LInux and becoming more proficient, because Linux and its recent advances have given me the comfort that I could use it and not get intimidated like I used to when using it in school.

Actually, that looks pretty decent. Must give it a whirl... Thanks for the video! D.

I think doing this at the filesystem level (i.e btrfs/zfs) with what Ubuntu is doing for users automatically is a little nicer of a solution, because reboots aren't necessary, the live filesystem is RW but the snapshots are RO unless something goes wrong, and you can boot into a snapshot. However, I do like this direction, where there is a greater visibility into what's different between my machine and your machine at a higher level than 'zfs diff'.

You apologized for using older hardware for your test rig... but I think it's awesome that you are using a Q8400 Core Quad. Shows what can be done with older hardware using current, even cutting edge, operating systems.

macOS Catalina has its OS in Read Only.

Something like this could be useful for servers and workstations, or other machines used in an enterprise setting.

This looks awesome. I gotta check this out.

So the toolbox is like systemd-nspawn... Interesting. Can you install a different distro (debian, arch) with toolbox like you can with systemd-nspawn? since they are just bootstrapping the kernel.

Still pretty much a newbie... but I like the concept and can envisage the potential going forward. Might take a while to catch on though :)

Much better path than Ubuntu and snaps

Very cool, hadn't heard about this. Going to try Rawhide now

I am a huge fan of this concept. My Dell Latitude came with Ubuntu pre-installed like the XPS system do, if something goes wrong, you can easily roll back to the pre-installed system. I know this is a little different, but it's the same idea really. Virtually similar to that of Windows recovery back in the day, only with all the extra crap.

I always wanted something like this for Debian. For now I am using TimeShift with btrfs snapshot which makes rollbacks possible in 5 seconds then reboot.

The software app remains the gnome software. It's strange, since the proposal is to install flatpak applications and evict to install apps into the ostree. I try to install gedit using the software app, and nothing occurs at the end of the install. I expected that before installing there would be a confirmation message stating that ostree branch will be changed and after installing a message that it would have to restart before the application could run.

With Anaconda as the installer, silverblue will never reach its full potential. Calamares needs to be there.

New sub and new to GNU/Linux. Great delivery \ Great presentation \ Great thumbnails \ Great vid all round. Thanks for educating me today!

Dorian out here spitting fire once again. Thank you sir. Absolutely brilliant.

Bom tutorial, Fedora Rocks... :)

Security wise, what protections are in place to prevent someone from taking control by replacing your OS image with their own? My first thought was by veryifying the checksum of the OS image online to a trusted database every now and then, but if someone has control over the entire OS then that could be trivially bypassed.

Great to see you are back

This may be the future of Linux, but doesn't necessarily mean every company will suddenly hop on board. Not long ago, I was working in a data center that was still running Win 2000, XP, DOS-VSE with ISAM disk storage, & everyone's favorite Unix flavor to rip to pieces was SCO UnixWare. Even Sun/Oracle has version Solaris 11 out, but working as a consultant, the one company was still running Solaris 7. Unless this becomes the mainstream, companies are not just going to revamp everything.

How well does it work with mounted drives, and having to edit /etc/fstab ? Also, the toolbox reminds me of how systemd handles containers with systemd-nspawn , machinectl

The installation process didn't work for me, but when that happens I get redirected to something better Fedora 36. It would be nice if they made Silver Blue more law enforcement and forensic based.

Nice idea but this would consume large amounts of disk space just for images.

Looks like Solaris/FreeBSD with ZFS roots on the OS side. Flatpak compatibility will be a problem when you do rollbacks unless you also rollback the flatpak.

very helpful overview, Dorian, thank you! are you aware of any demo/instructions for a successful HP printer setup in Fedora Silverblue?

No thanks. That's what regular back ups are for. Fedora is great for an office environment where productivity is essential and down time costly. I use Debian. If it pukes I reload the previous day's back up and I'm good to go. Takes 4 minutes. I've been using Unix derived OS's since 1985. I like having TOTAL control over my systems.

Wow. Well explained. Can you, ohh I know you can. OK let me request this way. Will you make a tutorial video on installing CentOS minimal and Cinnamon on it? Thanks in advance.

And I hope there will be Fedora Spin with Silverblue feature on it.

Nope. I've been on it for a month. 1.) Flatpaks are specifically designed for systems where the user does not have root access. They are garbage for hardware development. The only way to give a flatpak access to hardware like a USB port is to use "--device=all" command line arg. This gives the app access to everything under /dev/ and thus creating a hole in the sandbox bigger than the whole sandbox. There is no way to limit app access to a single port or use. 2.) The same hardware access problem exists within a toolbox. 3.) Once these problems become evident, and one realizes that this is not well documented, other issues become apparent. Inside the software center there are many apps for hobbyist hardware development, apps like Arduino IDE, STM32cubeIDE, Geany, etc. Software devs probably won't have issues with stuff like Geany, but something like the Arduino IDE is a different issue. No one uses the Arduino IDE without connecting a device to compile and upload code to directly. Anyone working on a more complex design will get off of the Arduino IDE. It's only useful for small projects with a few hundred lines of code. More specifically, it's useful for projects where the speed of connection and access to a simple serial terminal are a priority, and the code is small enough to read in a single flat file. Anything larger should be done with a more feature rich toolchain. Your probably thinking, "So what?" around right now. Well, look at the reviews in the software center. You'll see only short, positive, generic 4-5 star reviews...everywhere. There may be a few mentions in a chart about some reviews that are less than 4 stars, but you can't actually see those. Well here's where that whole Arduino IDE thing comes in. I've searched DDG a bunch looking for forum threads on flatpaks, silverblue, and as many terms as this message is long, yeah that many... People aren't talking about this stuff bc no one is actually using it. This should be a common issue that everyone is having. No one is using the Arduino IDE without connecting hardware. This fact confirms that the dubious positive reviews in the software center are fake. The star system is not a rating system, it is a bias filter. This misrepresentation is completely unacceptable and counterproductive. It violates the premis of FOSS transparency, and wastes the user's time by masking relevant critical information. I operate under the premis 'if I find dishonest practices when I am not looking for them; there are far more things happening that I am not yet aware of.' 3.) On the command line, when typing 'toolbox --help' the resulting commands are all wrong. There are also lots of references to man pages that don't exist. The online docs are no better. They are sparse to nonexistent. Overall Silverblue is for basic users of the internet and playing a few games. It is not a real dev workstation alternative, hobbyist or pro, by any stretch.

I smell a distro challenge in the air ;P

I feel like this is all unnecessarily complicated.

And I thought I was the last person with that 2009 BIOS.

What development environments are available to use in the toolbox? I've been trying to look for this information everywhere. Thanks to this video many can get started on Sliverblue.

Feels like people really need to know NixOS

Get your Fedora hat on.

talking of the os tree and being a read os system, how does it compare with endless os that also works on os tree and is also a read only os system?

Does everything use like UUID format? So basically like virtualization within the container layer in a way kinda seen this coming as I am sure it will get more 'containerzied'. So like a 'software store' within the embedded image but multi-layered.

Having to reboot for every single thing is literally a top 3 reason why I left Windows. And now here is Red Hat using systemd and immutable OS to become the Microsoft of Linux.

Thank You for recommending this vid! To me, this could help in future development in Linux distros going onto mobile devices. Layers for stability and sandboxing of apps to help protect and secure privacy. Purism has something similar for the mobile phone side. I hope Pine will offer a similar distro to be used on their phone and laptop. We need more mobile development. crApple and I Google at your info then sell it... i mean Android are failing their customers. Question: Could the toolbox be used to help develop applications in a desired environment, without effecting the OS, to see how the app functions and do bug hunting and for any compatibility issues?

So, it's basically Endless OS, but without its EULA? Neat, I hope the GPU drivers on the Flatpak side come pre-configured

I'm gonna sit on the fence on this one me thinks

the gnome wall is in a weird place if you use centOS, I found it :)

I have Godot now, thanks. No launcher, no terminal command either. The Software Center is now loaded with choices.

loved it

Since you have all these images or states saved, does that take up a large amount of space on your drive? In order to save disk space, I assume you can delete old images.

Thanks for the great video and for your work! Fedora Linux definitely is the future 😎👍

Just had a quick install and run with Fedora 31 silverblue not sure I am getting the idea of the benefits v the slow clunky installs and lack of knowing what the hell its doing when you are on the software page and it just goes blank doing something. I guess it might be me not being use to it, although it does seem slower than all the other Distros I have tried. I like the idea of a quick jump back for a complete fix if something is not working, however timeshift does enough to get me running again with lower overheads and hassle. Great reviews and tips though hope you do many more :-)

So it's taking the idea of the microkernel operating system and translating it to the macro level, on a monolithic kernel GNU/Linux operating system? Basically converting it into a "micro operating system" that allows different "modules" (packages/apps/programs) to be stacked on top?

A nice vid. I'd like to point out how well it's actually done. Lovely voiceover as well. Wonder what happens when you do a ostree install xyz .. and a new official image comes out. Does it apply your changes over it - kinda like git rebase? Also .. let's say you'd install vagrant and virtual box from a flatpak. What happens to the virtual machines - specifically the write permissions?

I have Mac pro...But I am planning to move to Linus as my next OS...Mac is so expensive for not so much value...

I am intrigued , but why do I want to do this ? The useful part seems to more or less a system snapshot in the form of an image. Who wants to use this what type of user ? The read only filesystem is throwing me off, how do toolboxes and containers interact ?... I am going to have to re watch this.

I have installed this on "VirtualBox" in my Win 10 machine with no issues other than not being able to get my shared folder to mount at all. Could one of you folks who actually know what you are doing with Fedora please explain what I might have done wrong, or is this just a "bug" when trying to use this OS in VirtualBox? Also, how does one remove all of those unneeded (for me) input methods (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.)?

Similar to Git kind of... Good

Watched the video and did try to use Silverblue 32, but I enabled 3rd party Software, but didnt got Flatpak ans Gnome Shell Extensions repositories :( Flatpak Repro could be installed/activated via their webpage, but I couldnt find how to add the Gnome shell extension repository to Silverblue 32 - any URL/idea for me?

idk, I'm mixed on this. it adds a paradigm on top of the paradigm that Linux already has set, there are dedicated directories for software and specifications, tools were made and years were spent learning how to work with it. And now its changing radically. I'm not against it, as a paradigm shift may not be bad. But isn't this against the holistic / monolithic design of Linux. Doesn't performance & storage space take a massive hit with duplication of dependencies, and makes things more complicated because there's yet another thing to consider when developing for Linux. It adds convenience for the user, but the fine grains show when you're working with the terminal. man pages become decentralized, filepaths become excessive, sudo power is taken away, and updates are no longer straight forward. Distributions like Arch and Manjaro with the Arch User Repo are good at keeping packages up to date, whilst following specifications; makes Flatpaks and Silverblue seem like an over-engineered solution. So it just seems odd to me, why this is the future of Linux.