Caleb Woodbine's blog
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đ Switching to Fedora Silverblue
This operating system may be the future of how Linux based OSes function.
What is Fedora Silverblue?
(Some) apps that I use and how they are installed and run
Recently I've managed to make my desktop workflow capable of running almost entirely in containers (of various kinds).
| Name | How it's installed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chromium | rpm-ostree (host) | Un-containerised, due to unavailability as a Flatpak |
| vscode | Flatpak | Installed from FlatHub |
| FL Studio | Toolbox container + ~/.wine folder | I installed Wine as a dependency in a separate toolbox container, wired up the .desktop file to inteface the wine command to launch the container |
| emacs | iitoolbox container | emacs is installed in a container due to portability and on-boarding of iimacs.d configuration |
| Safe Surfer Desktop | AppImage | Only available format |
Challenges with Wine
FL Studio was a minor challenge to get working. A caveat of Fedora Silverblue is that Wine is incapable of being installed on the host system (due to only supporting 64-bit apps). Here's the solution:
- Set up the Wine environment
# create the toolbox container
toolbox create -c wine
# enter the container
toolbox enter -c wine
# install wine
sudo dnf install -y wine- Install FL Studio in your home folder from inside the toolbox container
# launch the installer
wine $HOME/Downloads/flstudio_win.exe- Create the .desktop
$HOME/.local/share/applications/FL Studio 20.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=FL Studio 20
Exec=/home/YOURUSER/bin/fl.sh
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Path=/home/YOURUSER/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Program Files (x86)/Image-Line/FL Studio 20
Icon=79E5_FL64.0
StartupWMClass=fl64.exe- Create the launch script:
$HOME/bin/fl.sh
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/toolbox run --container wine /usr/bin/env WINEPREFIX="/home/YOURUSER/.wine" /usr/bin/wine "C:\windows\command\start.exe" /Unix "/home/YOURUSER/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/YOURUSER/Start Menu/Programs/Image-Line/FL Studio 20.lnk"Now FL Studio should be available in your app launcher. Hopefully one day, FL Studio may be available as a Flatpak (I've been trying to get that to work over here, having issues with Wine in a Flatpak).
OS Architecture
Fedora Silverblue rocks a read-only root filesystem. All user data is stashed in the separate partition of /var/home and all persistent data is in /var.
To me, the separation of the OS and user-data makes so much sense and is how it should be.
The OS & user-impact
Fedora Silverblue is intended to be a modern simple rock-solid-stable user-facing operating system with focus on everyone-has-the-same-thing consistency via the technology rpm-ostree. Because of rpm-ostree and Flatpaks, the consistency of working with common and same libraries helps developers to keep users happy as their apps would be running and behaving as expected.
Migrating from Fedora Workstation
Currently there isn't a migration path or a plan for one yet, which is unfortunate. The OS's layout a fair bit different so there may be a bunch of planning for this to be a possibility.
Backing up and restoring data
I used rsync (to ensure that everything was copied) to copy data to an external drive. After the installation, rsync was also used for restoring the data back (the same command but in reverse).
Final thoughts
I've been really happy with Fedora Silverblue (and Fedora in general). I'm really excited for it to be something that any person can use, taking out any pain that may be had with traditional Linux distributions.
Give it a try!
