Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Their New Silverblue

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Their New Silverblue

Fedora is hosting a test day today for testing their new Silverblue spin, formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Silverblue-Test-Day

[wizard69]

SilverBlue or whatever the latest name for this move is, needs a bit of promotion because I still odn't know why I would want to go that way. That is at this point I can't see a rational reason to step away from standard Fedora to support this new packaging system.

The little that I know so far is that Flatpaks kinda reassembles Apples approach to app distribution. The problem there is that the is good and bad to every technique.

So Michael, maybe you could get a guest writer from the Fedora team to write an article on flatpaks as why I should want them. At this point I'm running Fedora 29 Beta (1.1 GB update going at this very moment) and honestly wonder if flatpaks offer me anything of value from the standpoint of a user or a developer.

Speaking of which, if flatpaks can put an end to system updates every six months there might be some value in them. The worse thing about Fedora is the need to update your entire system twice a year to stay current.

[RomuloP]

They just need to solve two things that are minimum requisite for me, so I will move to it and never look back. The problem with BTRFS and the fuzzy labeled as "supported" FreeDesktop Boot Loader Specification and EFI atomicity, all this desktop atomicity is extremely useless for me unless EFI atomicity is done... Silverblue is great but I still need, without a discussion, lightweight snapshots for all my partitions, for backup, replication and quick manipulation. So, until then, I can't se a valid point in moving from a solid 5 years old installation to SilverBlue and help testing it.

[thecursedfly]

SilverBlue or whatever the latest name for this move is, needs a bit of promotion because I still odn't know why I would want to go that way. That is at this point I can't see a rational reason to step away from standard Fedora to support this new packaging system.

The little that I know so far is that Flatpaks kinda reassembles Apples approach to app distribution. The problem there is that the is good and bad to every technique.

So Michael, maybe you could get a guest writer from the Fedora team to write an article on flatpaks as why I should want them. At this point I'm running Fedora 29 Beta (1.1 GB update going at this very moment) and honestly wonder if flatpaks offer me anything of value from the standpoint of a user or a developer.

Speaking of which, if flatpaks can put an end to system updates every six months there might be some value in them. The worse thing about Fedora is the need to update your entire system twice a year to stay current.

Tbh, I think that the advantages of flatpak are described a bit all over the recent linux world...

But, to mention a few things, as I understand it (I'm not an expert, just reading things here and there), if all your applications were flatpaks, you wouldn't have any incompatibilities or issues upgrading from Fedora 28 to 29 because all that the flatpaks rely on are the "flatpak" base package itself and the freedesktop/gnome/kde runtimes (which are also flatpaked). So the same flatpaked application works on any distro and version as long as the "flatpak" package is installed and up to date.
Also, there is the possibility to sandbox the applications which increases their security.
And the aim is to give the control of flatpaks to the application developers directly (not to the distro maintainers) which frees development resources for the distros and allows for newer application versions basically as soon as a new version is released. Packaging issues would be avoided by the fact that everybody is using the same (flatpak) application as tested by the developer.

Anybody please correct me if I'm wrong

I agree though that some more information could be useful about the Silverblue spin because I still son't exactly understand what the goods and bads are of it, although the few things I read sound quite interesting (ex. the possibility to revert any updates that went bad, although I believe this is in part possible also with the normal Fedora and I don't grasp exactly the differences).

[Candy]

The little that I know so far is that Flatpaks kinda reassembles Apples approach to app distribution.

Thats what they basicly tell everyone. But they keep forget telling people that the flatpak system requires another Linux System ontop of your Linux System. Basicly it installs another "Linux" kind of system in your /var/lib/flatpak directory. The last time I've checked, it was around ~600 mb of extra overhead ontop of your regular system.

But I am not surprised that Silverblue has only a few - if at all - testers. Even Fedora package maintainers refuse supporting it or still have many questions that remain unanswered or get answered with marketing speak.

You can learn more about the mixed feelings of Fedora maintainers on this list.
https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora...msg247538.html
https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg247547.html

[RomuloP]

SilverBlue or whatever the latest name for this move is, needs a bit of promotion because I still odn't know why I would want to go that way. That is at this point I can't see a rational reason to step away from standard Fedora to support this new packaging system.

This is one of many attempts on bringing failure mitigation techniques common on highly managed TI projects to user space paradigm. In part a lot of those mitigation techniques try to conciliate fast development with availability guarantee, It may break while moving fast, but you always can go back to a state where it works normally in minutes or even seconds, so the quick development risk turns much more manageable.

The little that I know so far is that Flatpaks kinda reassembles Apples approach to app distribution. The problem there is that the is good and bad to every technique.

It is not like Apples approach, you cannot, with so fine grained control and with so much guarantee, go back or isolate environment for example. A good part of SilverBlue is about containerization, and, apart from security, containers have many other positive aspects:

* ease reproduction of other environments (say fedora 22 compatible only software, having a 29 workstation)
* quickly getting clean pre-built environments for specific work
* avoiding compromising or messing with the base system.
etc...

It is much more a relevant thing for developers so I don't expect much interest from common users here, anyway "recovering from near anything with grace" is so good... It is true peace of mind.

[NotMine999]

If it's from Redhat "Just Say NO", with thanks to Nancy Reagan for voicing that memorable quote.

I ran away from Redhat and Fedora and RHEL years ago and did not look back.

I am much much happier now in my Linux usage because of it.

[wizard69]

I'd like to thank everybody that responded! Obviously I have reading to do, but that will take some searching and time. To be honest after reading the responses I really don't get it at all. If I understand some of the comments correctly they could accomplish much the same by stabilizing ABI's for longer than a month. If there is one thing I truly hate, with respect to Linux, it is apps breaking after an update; which is a far bigger problem on Linux than it is Mac OS or Windows. I'm not sure if flatpaks are an answer to this issue or not on Linux.

[Anvil]

i cant see this Flatpak crap taking off like Fedora Hope it will. to many people will still use the ordinary Fedora. but the way i see it ( Flatpaks ) only offer Better Security alla Sandboxing ) , im not convinced its actually Better . Silverblue hasnt been Marketed to well IMO.

Michael why didnt you wait to update to Vbulletin 5.4.5 ? which will have php7.3 support. ?

PHP Support

Due to upcoming changes in the PHP Support Cycle, we recommend that customers upgrade to PHP 7.1 or higher as soon as possible.
PHP 5.6
PHP 5.6 will reach end of life status on December 31st,We will be dropping support for PHP 5.6.X with the release of vBulletin 5.4.5. This coincides with the end of life status of PHP 5.6.X.

[finalzone]

@wizard69
Flatpak got inspiration from Sugar interface originally from One Laptop per Child project.