I’m considering trying out an immutable distro after using Tumbleweed for the last 6 years.

The two major options for me seem to be Fedora Kinoite or uBlue Aurora-dx

My understanding is that universal-blue is a downstream of Fedora Atomic

So, the points in favor of Kinoite is sticking closer to upstream, however it seems like I would need to layer quite a few packages. My understanding is that this is discouraged in an rpm-ostree setup, particularly due to update time and possible mismatches with RPMFusion

uBlue Aurora-dx seems to include a lot of the additional support I’d need - ROCm, distrobox, virt-manager, libratbag, media codecs, etc. however I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term

I’m curious what the community thinks between the two as a viable option

  • j0rge@lemmy.ml
    2·
    25 days ago

    I’m unclear how mature the project is and whether it will be updated in a timely manner long term

    ublue and bluefin co-maintainer here, we’ve been around for a while now (3rd birthday coming up!) and have been around in a more unofficial capacity for longer.

    Bluefin is feature complete and is in maintenance mode, it’s just going to get updated in perpetuity to 41, 42, etc. We invested in automation first so most of the maintenance is automatic and it doesn’t take much for our team to do it. Right now most of our major ticket items are waiting for things to finish landing in upstream Fedora, most of which are targetted towards F41. A good portion of the team have been around in OSS for a long time and a bunch of us work in the industry and depend on Bluefin for our jobs, so much so that we have a great working relationship with Framework, so we’re supporting those laptops as a community option for them.

    Aurora is relatively new, coming in just as Plasma 6 landed in fedora. Most reports with issues we get for it are things like it being a new major release, wayland/nvidia issues, etc.

    Hopefully that answers some of your questions, if you have more feel free to ask!

    • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      Hey! Thanks!

      I’ve installed Aurora to my new drive based off the comments here so far, and it’s been pretty smooth bringing my configs over :)

      Immutable is new to me, so I’m wondering how you manage host daemons and cli applications, such as mpd for music and password-store for password management

      Is the best practice to keep one Fedora <current release> distrobox with them?

      Also, are there any issues with upgrading a distrobox to a new major release over time?

      So far my mindset has been make sure I don’t layer anything, but maybe some things like mpd do make sense to layer?

      I also see brew as another option. Perhaps that’s the preferred way for those types of tools? However, it seems like the system upgrade script updates distrobox and not brew?

      Sorry for the rambling question - just trying to understand best practices with an immutable distro 😅

      • cakeofhonor@lemmy.world
        2·
        22 days ago

        One thing you can check out is quadlet, which is podman containers running as systemd services. You just basically put the .container files in the right directory and sytemd will pick them up and run them for you. I have syncthing and zerotier running like this.

        I don’t really think you need to layer anything unless you’re doing virtualization, but I haven’t really looked into that yet.

        • ozymandias117@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          22 days ago

          Thanks! That sounds like exactly what I’d want to run mpd. I’ll check it out

          For virtualization, I’m all good since I went with uBlue instead of Silverblue for now - the developer images come with lxc/lxd/qemu/libvirt :)

  • Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net
    0·
    25 days ago

    Short answer: use uBlue.

    Longer answer:

    Even though uBlue is technically “downstream”, it also isn’t. uBlue builds its’ packages automatically, and you are never more than a few hours (1 day max for huge updates) away from upstream. It feels more like “sidestream” (if that word exists?).

    One reason it exists is, as you already said, because layering takes quite some time.
    At least I personally don’t wanna use stock Fedora (Atomic) and would install some codecs, tweaks and such anyway, and uBlue does that already for me.
    Update time doesn’t matter anymore for me, because uBlue updates itself automatically in the background. Silverblue doesn’t do that afaik.

    Depending on how “custom” your system should be, you can take a look at the uBlue builder, where you can create your own image based on already existing ones if you like.

    The cool thing about Fedora Atomic is, that you don’t have to stick to anything. If you don’t like something anymore, you can rebase in less than two minutes without any hassle and jump from image to image, no matter if it’s an official one (e.g. Silverblue) or some obscure uBlue image.