Fedora Atomic Desktops Born Out Of Fedora Silverblue Success

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Atomic Desktops Born Out Of Fedora Silverblue Success

Born out of the success of Fedora Silverblue and the other Fedora immutable variants relying on RPM-OSTree, Fedora has announced Fedora Atomic Desktops as the new branding for these spins...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Atomic-Desktops

[Snaipersky]

Good. Actual, sensical naming. "Silverblue Kinoite" tells you nothing about it or why you should involve yourself with it. "Atomic KDE Desktop" gets the point across without sounding terrible.

[Jumbotron]

So for personal clarification....is Canonical's Ubuntu Core their version of an immutable OS built around Snaps even down to snapping the kernel, as opposed to however Red Hat is engineering Atomic Desktops ?

And is this the future of Linux desktops going forward ? Seems a lot like ChromeOS-ification of Linux. Not saying that's a good or bad thing. Just observing.

[kusma]

Fedora Atomic Desktop is going to be a FAD

[kon14]

That's great news and something I've been wishing were the case ever since Kinoite first came out.
Using a gazillion random names for, more or less, the exact same base system + flavor-specific libs and (almost no) system apps makes no sense whatsoever.

Not only did the original naming introduce pointless confusion over the nature of each individual project, but it also made querying for common issues and workarounds excessively harder over nothing.
And no, coming up with a natural object suffix for Fedora, that happens to start with the same letter as your desktop, absolutely doesn't make up for it.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

It's weird to standardize the naming for some of the desktops but not others. I realize Silverblue and Kinoite are the big two, but they should have taken the opportunity to rename them to Fedora Workstation Atomic and Fedora KDE Atomic.

[Candy]

Success? If it was a success, then there wouldn't be something new. I've never had the feeling that someone actually used it. Maybe from the entire userbase only 1-2%. The rest probably went Workstation, Xfce4 or netinstall something.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

So for personal clarification....is Canonical's Ubuntu Core their version of an immutable OS built around Snaps even down to snapping the kernel, as opposed to however Red Hat is engineering Atomic Desktops ?

And is this the future of Linux desktops going forward ? Seems a lot like ChromeOS-ification of Linux. Not saying that's a good or bad thing. Just observing.

Yes, at least for the big corporate backed distros. Fedora was discussing a goal of having > 50% of installs being the Atomic varieties within 5 years. SUSE is going a similar direction with ALP, and Canonical with Ubuntu Core Desktop. There will still be a million other non-immutable distros like usual though.

[ssokolow]

as opposed to however Red Hat is engineering Atomic Desktops ?

They use rpm-ostree, which is a non-containerizing frontend to the same libostree "git for your OS" system that Flatpak builds on.

[ssokolow]

Yes, at least for the big corporate backed distros. Fedora was discussing a goal of having > 50% of installs being the Atomic varieties within 5 years. SUSE is going a similar direction with ALP, and Canonical with Ubuntu Core Desktop. There will still be a million other non-immutable distros like usual though.

Hey, as long as Debian comes up with an apt-ostree so I'm not being yanked along by Fedora's eagerness to drop support for aging hardware and they hammer out a solution to Flatpak's design being so hostile to end-user patching of installed files (eg. a post-update hook), I'm all for it.

One of the big reasons I use an LTS+Flatpak combo is that I want to be easily and reliably able to rollback if an update introduces a bug (Flatpak) and, for the things I don't do that with, I want them to be "pinned at a version where I know what the bugs are and I'm used to working around them".

Having a non-containerized alternative to Flatpak without Snap's architectural misdesigns would mean I wouldn't be stuck on stale versions of things like Dolphin and Konsole with known bugs for years at a time (eg. the fix for "ejecting an optical drive can crash Dolphin" didn't make it into Kubuntu 22.04 LTS) because I consider it more acceptable than having to deal with updates I can't trivially roll back if I don't like them.