I have to applaud this post for many reasons, but I also agree with the approach entirely, and I worry it will scare people off.
Fedora is solid, and eschews the issues that make Arch hard to maintain and Ubuntu hard to stomach. The release cycle is very sane. IMHO It’s the first choice now for daily driving in the RPM world since CentOS was… insert your favorite word.
If I were OP, I wouldn’t have gone straight from Arch to Silverblue on my laptop. I would have done vanilla Fedora, and used one of its several Spins which ship with Gnome alternatives. Then I would have tried Silverblue on my desktop on a separate partition. Not in a VM because I would want to be a using the hardware unmediated, for science. It’s pretty exciting to have a NixOS-style immutability with a mainstream distro. It’s still very much Beta, and I’m not sure I have the energy to give to its edges. And that’s on desktop. Laptop driver support isn’t a guarantee, and it’s not clear to me about how a reboot-to-update workflow would look for me and I worry that a lot of software makes assumptions that aren’t true with Silverblue’s paradigms. What about hibernation!?
So I applaud the author, for jumping in with both feet. The amount of useful detail in that blog post will be saving people time for years to come.
And like a lot of people in this thread, getting off of Arch has been kind of liberating. I only recently switched over, but have had nothing but good experiences so far.
Just to note about the partition thing, you CAN do this with Silverblue, but it's not for beginners. The default is to use the whole disk. I dual boot, but give one whole disk to Silverblue and another whole disk to Windows.
I'm a long time Fedora user (on various laptops), so I'm already pretty comfortable in that ecosystem, but I don't think it's accurate to describe Silverblue as beta. It's not marketed nor considered as beta by the devs/community and it's based on technologies that were intended to be used in containerized production environments (Fedora IOT and CoreOS). Anecdotally, it's been far more stable than the (already stable) Fedora WS I've used before.
Re the other immutable Fedora desktop distros (i.e., Kinoite), those don't get quite as much support, so YMMV.
Partitions: That is interesting - are you saying partitions in general are challenging, or a particular aspect of how Sliverblue works? I'm on team whole disk too, KISS
Silverblue as beta: "Emerging Fedora Editions \ Preview the future of Fedora." GetFedora.org (bravo to whomever worked on that, its great for new folks). After you commented its not in "beta" I went looking for where I picked that notion up, and all I could find was that quote. Perhaps some minor copy revisions, or just eliminating the "Emerging Fedora Editions" category altogether for now, especially given Silverblue is the only thing in it. If it was moved up into the main section that would have eliminated that confusion entirely. I made a mock of that: https://imgur.com/a/DLMqK2e issue worthy?
Kinoite is interesting, but you've inspired enough confidence that I'm going to give Silverblue a go as a daily driver. I suppose with my early foray into NixOs it wasn't obvious if or how a desktop environment would work, and my use case was more exploring its devops features. Tell me if it isn't but Silverblue seems like the best of all worlds...
Hmm, I suppose you're right, beta might be an accurate based on that. Silverblue seems quite stable, but I guess the Fedora project isn't throwing all their resources behind it just. It's interesting because Fedora IOT uses `ostree` too, and isn't "emerging", perhaps because as a server/embedded device OS it's obviously for advanced users?
Re partitioning, it's mostly because the Anaconda installer doesn't support it. It doesn't equipped to deal with the what can be mounted as partitions in Silverblue isn't the same as normal Fedora. So it's not really too difficult if you read the docs and are comfortable with Linux, but it didn't seem worth it to me.
I've been really pleased with Silverblue. The only issue I had was an update silently failing last August. Otherwise, it just took some getting used to installing and running dev tools in toolbox/distrobox.
Fedora is solid, and eschews the issues that make Arch hard to maintain and Ubuntu hard to stomach. The release cycle is very sane. IMHO It’s the first choice now for daily driving in the RPM world since CentOS was… insert your favorite word.
If I were OP, I wouldn’t have gone straight from Arch to Silverblue on my laptop. I would have done vanilla Fedora, and used one of its several Spins which ship with Gnome alternatives. Then I would have tried Silverblue on my desktop on a separate partition. Not in a VM because I would want to be a using the hardware unmediated, for science. It’s pretty exciting to have a NixOS-style immutability with a mainstream distro. It’s still very much Beta, and I’m not sure I have the energy to give to its edges. And that’s on desktop. Laptop driver support isn’t a guarantee, and it’s not clear to me about how a reboot-to-update workflow would look for me and I worry that a lot of software makes assumptions that aren’t true with Silverblue’s paradigms. What about hibernation!?
So I applaud the author, for jumping in with both feet. The amount of useful detail in that blog post will be saving people time for years to come.
And like a lot of people in this thread, getting off of Arch has been kind of liberating. I only recently switched over, but have had nothing but good experiences so far.