Silverblue is pretty great. But it's really been taken to another level in the last few months since it started allowing you to _boot_ from a container image. That means, you can have some automated container build somewhere that you point rpm-ostree too which gets automatically pulled down to all your machines. It's like building your own distro, but without any of the work. Here's mine, for example:
And then, of course, I _also_ have an automated Arch build that I use with Distrobox on top of my custom Silverblue build. I get the stability of an immutable OS layer with the easy installs and package availability of Arch.
I've contributed to the Ublue project (https://ublue.it/) and it's totally a game changer to me. I can have my system image with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and all the packages I want on my host declared, built and signed in the cloud. Ublue also has an automatic system update service which means all of the upstream updates to the host system just get pulled and are avaible after a reboot.
Mostly everything not completely necessary on the host is installed as a flatpak, and I have an archlinux container/distrobox for all of my development needs. I've actually grown to love the distrobox system, as I never have to think about breaking or polluting my host system when installing new packages. GUI apps work flawlessly too, and I've heard that the integration is even better than with flatpaks, with GTK apps using the system theme automatically, and Libreoffice apps in different containers (which you probably shouldn't do either way) just work.
Thank you so much for sharing this, it looks really promising. Here is a video by Jorge Castro that explains the upsides that is linked from their site: https://www.youtube.com/watch/X8h304Jp9N8?t=435
I considered using an Arch container for development, but ultimately felt this wouldn't actually make my life easier, as I'd still have to deal with updating issues/manual work. Instead I'm just running a Fedora 37 container, and thus far it's working great.
> Silverblue is pretty great. But it's really been taken to another level in the last few months since it started allowing you to _boot_ from a container image.
What was the state of affairs before? Is the main advantage that at install time, all you do is download the image (i.e., you don't have to actually run the automation on the target)?
Well, before it was just a lot more work to create an install image and keep it updated. So you'd just stick with the official Silverblue image, or the spins (KDE, Sway, etc).
And yeah, the advantage now is that you just pull from your image, and all the automations are run on the server beforehand. That means, if something breaks, you just don't upgrade because there's no new image, everything stays in sync across all your machines for free, and you don't have to use a bash/ansible/whatever script when you set up a new machine. Upgrades are also faster because all the layering has been done beforehand, thought that's not much of an issue if you have upgrades run in the background, which you should.
https://github.com/pkulak/filverblue/
And then, of course, I _also_ have an automated Arch build that I use with Distrobox on top of my custom Silverblue build. I get the stability of an immutable OS layer with the easy installs and package availability of Arch.