this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
530 points (99.1% liked)
Gaming
3228 readers
331 users here now
The Lemmy.zip Gaming Community
For news, discussions and memes!
Community Rules
This community follows the Lemmy.zip Instance rules, with the inclusion of the following rule:
You can see Lemmy.zip's rules by going to our Code of Conduct.
What to Expect in Our Code of Conduct:
- Respectful Communication: We strive for positive, constructive dialogue and encourage all members to engage with one another in a courteous and understanding manner.
- Inclusivity: Embracing diversity is at the core of our community. We welcome members from all walks of life and expect interactions to be conducted without discrimination.
- Privacy: Your privacy is paramount. Please respect the privacy of others just as you expect yours to be treated. Personal information should never be shared without consent.
- Integrity: We believe in the integrity of speech and action. As such, honesty is expected, and deceptive practices are strictly prohibited.
- Collaboration: Whether you're here to learn, teach, or simply engage in discussion, collaboration is key. Support your fellow members and contribute positively to shared learning and growth.
If you enjoy reading legal stuff, you can check it all out at legal.lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you're used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don't have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That's why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I'm also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is
clevis-dracut
so network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don't want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason... Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.Damn, that's a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I'll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I've picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I'll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they're kind of containers. That's obviously also they're biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don't integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc... The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It's really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it's my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It's really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you're doing, install all of that thing's dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That's a big no from me. I'm not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can't tell, I'm stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
I've layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I've got two users on this computer and
systemctl enable syncthing@user
is easier than dealing with podman containers right now.You should check out podman quadlets. It turns your containers into systemd services.