Slightly off topic (especially since this spin doesn’t seem to actually have a 32 release yet), but is anyone here running Fedora Silverblue? I’m considering moving over to that, but I’ve been burned before. I’m curious for anyone that is running it, how much of an impedance do you feel it is to your everyday development?
The last “interesting” OS I tried was NixOS, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was getting in my way more than it was really helping me. Mostly this came down to installing dev tools. I found I wasn’t working on things that were interesting to be because it was too much of a pain to get tools installed. (Rust (latest versions), Adruino (I think having it at all?), and LuaSocket (was getting built wrong, I gave up trying to find where it wanted the -D LUA_COMPAT_APIINTCASTS compile option after 3 hours) are what come to mind.)
If there is anyone running silverblue here, do you ever have similar kinds of issues?
I only tried Silverblue on a spare hard disk that I have lying around. I think it is really a bit step forward and like what they are doing. I am reading the Silverblue forums semi-regularly and it seems that Fedora Toolbox (which is used to create VMs for doing development in) breaks every now and then. It seems that Silverblue is still a second-class citizen to regular Fedora. On the other hand, given the nature of Silverblue these problems are easily solved by booting into an older snapshot when such a glitch occurs for the short timeframe it takes them to fix it. Unfortunately, I do not have more data points than that. Besides that it is not possible to run Nix on the root filesystem by default, because / is immutable.
I would monitor the Silverblue forums for a while, because it gives a good idea of what kind of problems to expect.
Rust (latest versions)
I know that this post not about Nix. But with the Mozilla Nix overlay, you can get the latest stable/beta/nightly: mozilla.latest.rustChannels.{stable,beta,nightly}. You can also use the overlay to get any arbitrary stable or nightly version. See the following:
I use NixOS on various machines, but I would really recommend newcomers to use Nix for a while on a familiar distribution. NixOS is so much more fun if you have climbed part of the Nix learning curve (know the Nix language, know your way around nixpkgs). That way you can always revert back to what you know if trying to do it the Nix way takes too much time.
I have been running Silverblue on my desktop and my laptop since late January. I enjoy it.
I resisted the docker fad for a long time for many reasons, but mainly because I thought the implementation of docker was unfortunate, and the ways people used it was cumbersome and error-prone. Podman solves the former, and Toolbox solves the latter.
There are a few rough edges. Toolbox switching isn’t as nice as it could be (there could be Terminal integrations that would make this nicer), toolbox shits a lot of things in your environment (at least one of these conflicts with Ruby on Rails, so I have to unset VERSION to be able to run migrations), and a few other tiny things.
The documentation is still sparse.
Overall, I’m very happy with it and will continue to use it. This is the first time I’ve used anything other than Debian since before the bo release.
I’d jumped around a couple distros for various reasons (temporal recounting over the last ten years):
Fedora: wanted to follow along with RH (my early days of Linux)
Arch: wanted to be able to consume as “pure” a systemd stack as I could to get a good feel for things
Debian: wanted to converge my workstations (testing) and servers (stable+backports)
Fedora: wanted to really start adopting podman+toolbox
I jumped back into Fedora, via silverblue, with F31 and I’ve been using F31 and F32 interchangeably as necessary (when a package in F32 wasn’t working well I could always just use my pinned F31 instance).
With Arch and Debian I was effectively rolling my workstation, which is a comfort as if you’re using newer hardware you want new kernels and often you want to get your hands on something without having to consider packaging yourself. Silverblue basically marries up the principles of a released system with the principles of rolling in a way that I find to be completely and utterly acceptable for my use cases. I am able to effectively “ride” the releases of Fedora without having to do a precarious upgrade or reinstall.
I’ll say, I am likely layering many more packages in than what you’d see people typically recommend.
I’m of the mindset that I choose to run a distribution because I trust the packaging guidelines and the packagers of the software. This means that I’m quite preferential to using the fedora packages. I’ve been using flatpak where necessary but I am only consuming packages that are either:
packaged by upstream in a way that I think is better than the equivalent package in Fedora
doesn’t exist in fedora in a reasonable way (e.g. mumble)
I am only a little bit struggling in the sense that Fedora IoT is the “headless” version of Silverblue (if you want to think that way) and it’s difficult to get kernel modules (e.g. ZFS) into. I’d love to be able to install Fedora on my servers and have ZFS available, but be able to “ride the releases” by pulling composes rather than reinstalling.
The last “interesting” OS I tried was NixOS, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was getting in my way more than it was really helping me.
I dipped my toes into Nix right before going to silverblue and had the same sentiment.
Slightly off topic (especially since this spin doesn’t seem to actually have a 32 release yet), but is anyone here running Fedora Silverblue? I’m considering moving over to that, but I’ve been burned before. I’m curious for anyone that is running it, how much of an impedance do you feel it is to your everyday development?
The last “interesting” OS I tried was NixOS, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was getting in my way more than it was really helping me. Mostly this came down to installing dev tools. I found I wasn’t working on things that were interesting to be because it was too much of a pain to get tools installed. (Rust (latest versions), Adruino (I think having it at all?), and LuaSocket (was getting built wrong, I gave up trying to find where it wanted the
-D LUA_COMPAT_APIINTCASTScompile option after 3 hours) are what come to mind.)If there is anyone running silverblue here, do you ever have similar kinds of issues?
I only tried Silverblue on a spare hard disk that I have lying around. I think it is really a bit step forward and like what they are doing. I am reading the Silverblue forums semi-regularly and it seems that Fedora Toolbox (which is used to create VMs for doing development in) breaks every now and then. It seems that Silverblue is still a second-class citizen to regular Fedora. On the other hand, given the nature of Silverblue these problems are easily solved by booting into an older snapshot when such a glitch occurs for the short timeframe it takes them to fix it. Unfortunately, I do not have more data points than that. Besides that it is not possible to run Nix on the root filesystem by default, because / is immutable.
I would monitor the Silverblue forums for a while, because it gives a good idea of what kind of problems to expect.
I know that this post not about Nix. But with the Mozilla Nix overlay, you can get the latest stable/beta/nightly:
mozilla.latest.rustChannels.{stable,beta,nightly}. You can also use the overlay to get any arbitrary stable or nightly version. See the following:https://discourse.nixos.org/t/pin-rust-version/5812/2 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/pin-rust-version/5812/3
I use NixOS on various machines, but I would really recommend newcomers to use Nix for a while on a familiar distribution. NixOS is so much more fun if you have climbed part of the Nix learning curve (know the Nix language, know your way around nixpkgs). That way you can always revert back to what you know if trying to do it the Nix way takes too much time.
Sorry for the digression ;).
I have been running Silverblue on my desktop and my laptop since late January. I enjoy it.
I resisted the docker fad for a long time for many reasons, but mainly because I thought the implementation of docker was unfortunate, and the ways people used it was cumbersome and error-prone. Podman solves the former, and Toolbox solves the latter.
There are a few rough edges. Toolbox switching isn’t as nice as it could be (there could be Terminal integrations that would make this nicer), toolbox shits a lot of things in your environment (at least one of these conflicts with Ruby on Rails, so I have to
unset VERSIONto be able to run migrations), and a few other tiny things.The documentation is still sparse.
Overall, I’m very happy with it and will continue to use it. This is the first time I’ve used anything other than Debian since before the bo release.
I’d jumped around a couple distros for various reasons (temporal recounting over the last ten years):
I jumped back into Fedora, via silverblue, with F31 and I’ve been using F31 and F32 interchangeably as necessary (when a package in F32 wasn’t working well I could always just use my pinned F31 instance).
With Arch and Debian I was effectively rolling my workstation, which is a comfort as if you’re using newer hardware you want new kernels and often you want to get your hands on something without having to consider packaging yourself. Silverblue basically marries up the principles of a released system with the principles of rolling in a way that I find to be completely and utterly acceptable for my use cases. I am able to effectively “ride” the releases of Fedora without having to do a precarious upgrade or reinstall.
I’ll say, I am likely layering many more packages in than what you’d see people typically recommend.
I’m of the mindset that I choose to run a distribution because I trust the packaging guidelines and the packagers of the software. This means that I’m quite preferential to using the fedora packages. I’ve been using flatpak where necessary but I am only consuming packages that are either:
I am only a little bit struggling in the sense that Fedora IoT is the “headless” version of Silverblue (if you want to think that way) and it’s difficult to get kernel modules (e.g. ZFS) into. I’d love to be able to install Fedora on my servers and have ZFS available, but be able to “ride the releases” by pulling composes rather than reinstalling.
I dipped my toes into Nix right before going to silverblue and had the same sentiment.
I’m waiting for Fedora 64.
Fedora 32 should be enough for anyone. That’s +/- 2,147,483,647 hats!
Huh….my desktop is named Fedora64. I guess I won’t need to upgrade for quite a while.