Linux

Why ublue over fedora’s images?

Personally, I've been enjoying uBlue over vanilla Fedora Atomic for what they offer in terms of system management.

To give you a better idea on what I mean; just a month ago an update to Podman caused breakage and people weren't able to use their containers created with Distrobox/Toolbx^[1]^. Sure; a rollback is accomplished relatively easy and I'm sure some would even be able to fix it themselves. Regardless, every Fedora Atomic user that relied on Podman would have been interrupted to some capacity.

Which, of course, begs the following questions... Isn't it very inefficient for everyone to fix this issue themselves? Wouldn't it be easier if somehow Fedora forced some fix upon all of us so that just one entity is burdened instead of all of us? Heck, wouldn't it be better if Fedora just withhold the update until it's fixed? Is this perhaps some pipe dream that will never see the light of day? etc...

The interesting part, though, would be how I (a 'uBlue-user') didn't even notice Podman was causing issues in the first place. "How?" you might ask, well... The uBlue devs noticed the issue, applied some magic so that I and many other uBlue users like me just went on with their day like they would otherwise; without being interrupted because Podman just had a bad update. (Did the supposed pipe dream actually already exist in some form or fashion?)

This is just the most recent example of this. But in the last year or so, out of the top of my head, there have been a few more times in which uBlue users didn't even notice a thing while the others either had to rollback or fix their issues themselves. If you enjoy this interruption and/or are willing to deal with it for the sake of whatever, then please feel to continue to do so. However, I prefer to have a system I can rely on at all times and uBlue offers me just that while remaining very close to vanilla Fedora Atomic.

You won’t have fedoras signatures anymore.

It depends if you have the luxury to rely on them in the first place.

If setting up your workflow (or whatever) requires you to get to the nitty gritty of things and change those parts of the system that strictly speaking isn't well supported by just rpm-ostree, then -for almost a year now- your best bet would have been to (instead) experiment with (what's been referred in Fedora's Wiki as) Ostree Native Containers.

And the truth is, unless you really know what you're doing, that uBlue offers the best platform to engage with this system. Heck, within a week after Kinoite's very own maintainer blogged about how to sign container images via Github actions, one of uBlue's maintainers tried to implement this for uBlue to improve their own platform and succeeded.

Finally, let's not forget that uBlue is even endorsed by Fedora (or at least by whoever maintains its documentation). Heck, even the inception of uBlue was due to an interaction between Jorge Castro (one of uBlue's maintainers) and Colin Walters (one of the masterminds behind the whole rpm-ostree-ecosystem).

P.S. If I hadn't made it clear, it's totally fine to continue to rely on Fedora Atomic directly without any interventions from third parties for system management or whatsoever. I just wanted to elaborate why I, personally, prefer to use images provided by uBlue.

1. Source to a thread in which this is discussed.