Give Fedora Silverblue a test drive

Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades.  Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.

Additionally,  Fedora Silverblue delivers desktop applications as  Flatpaks. This provides better isolation / sandboxing of applications, and streamlines updating applications — Flatpaks can be safely updated without reboot.

The Fedora Workstation team is running a Test Day for Silverblue next week, so if you want to try it out, and help out the development effort at the same time, keep reading.

Test Fedora Silverblue

Next Thursday, September 20 2018, Team Silverblue and Fedora QA are holding a Test Day for users to try out and test this new Fedora Workstation variant.

The wiki page for the silverblue has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results.

How do test days work?

A test day is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events.

For Developers

17 Comments

  1. Heliosstyx

    Great ideas for Fedora Workstation. I hope this will spread over to other Fedora spins and labs.

    • GroovieMan

      No i hope not!

      The current packaging works perfectly and gives the Fedora a very professional touch. I do not see any benefit to drop this perfectly organized infrastructure with a unproven testbed. It was one great advantage of Linux systems, that you have one pakacgemanager that is responsible for everything on your system.

      If Fedora wants to loos its reputation go on .. and flatpack you system until you feel that chaos you know from your Windows.

      • Relax. That’s why this is called a TEST DAY. It’s an opportunity to take this thing for a spin and see how it works. If the project is successful and proves itself reliable, it may make it’s way into other flavors as well. The developers aren’t stupid. The project didn’t get this far and this successful without making smart decisions. That being said, there’s always room for experimenting and trying new things. Some things work and some don’t. If this proves to be one that doesn’t work, it’ll likely remain it’s own “spin” not unlike openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap.

      • Davi Zinunu

        Sounds right…! Change isn’t always good. Keep what works…

  2. Andreas WERNER

    Here
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2018-09-04_I18N_Test_Day
    I should test with Fedora 29
    https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/development/29/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-29-20180912.n.0.iso

    But here
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2018-09-20_Silverblue_Testday
    I should test with Fedora 28
    https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/28/AtomicWorkstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-AtomicWorkstation-ostree-x86_64-28-1.1.iso

    Why testing once with Fedora 29 and once with 28? And the more progressive technique with older version? This is confusing!

    Or are there Silverblue images for Fedora 29 somewhere?

    I am just upgrading an install Fed 28 to Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-29-20180911.n.0 on an iMac 2017 to see how it perfoms now there on this HW. Especially Thunderbolt. Why can’t I do this with Silverblue(rpm-ostree)? With EndlessOS OStree already runs perfectly. Just a reboot. Tested this.

    • Luya Tshimbalanga

      Fedora 29 is currently on beta stage to exactly resolve such issue.

    • Peter Braet

      Not Found

      The requested URL /pub/fedora/linux/development/29/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-29-20180912.n.0.iso was not found on this server.

  3. Alex

    I just gave Silverblue a test earlier this week. I liked the idea behind it, but some things like deja-dup for backups weren’t working and if you selected btrfs the grub installation failed (All of which have been reported on Bugzilla). But I’ll keep checking up on it in a VM and look forward to being able to use it on bare metal when some of these issues are fixed (mainly looking for another automatic backup solution)

  4. LackingEvolution

    OK so I installed Silverblue. The installation went very well. I had to back up my data prior to, and found the automatic partitioning was the easiest solution for drive setup. What I don’t like is the following… Evolution, which has been my mail program of choice for some time with Fedora and even before Fedora, basically since I have been using Gnome, does not install as standard in the ostree. So I think, no problem, just install it as a flatpak. There is no Evolution flatpak. Check at the Gnome site, and lo and behold the people who work on Evolution have a method to make your own flatpak from the Evolution sources. Great I think, until I find out that the ostree does not install flatpak-builder as a default ?!?!?!?! So I go to try and do a layered install of flatpak-builder only to be informed that it won’t install since it would require installing older versions of flatpak and other dependencies required by flatpak-builder!!! OK, so I can use another mail program, but I like Evolution and have been using it for some time. I don’t mind living at the bleeding edge, I’ve been doing it for a number of years now. I don’t like to complain about something that is worked on by people in their spare time, since they don’t really have to do it in the first place. But I have to complain about the apparent disconnectedness of flatpak and flatpak-builder. What gives? Has anyone else tried to use flatpak-builder in Silverblue for non-flatpak software? Maybe I am doing something wrong.

    • Jens Petersen

      I believe an Evolution flatpak is forthcoming: I heard people are working on it. 🙂

      • LackingEvolution

        Yes, I believe it is, and if you go to their wiki, there is a nice set of instructions to guide making your own flatpak for it.

  5. Andy Tai

    what is the future of this with respect to the current rpm based Fedora installations? would current Fedora releases eventually switch to be rpm-ostree based?

  6. Jakfrost

    Just submitted some test results.

  7. svsv sarma

    I could download and install Fedora silverblue in the Virtual Box of Fedora 28 on 14 sept. So far so good. But I could not update so far, the update server seems to be busy. Perhaps I can experiment on it further only after 20 sept.

  8. Jakfrost

    Is anyone going to post the subsequent test results?

  9. Peter Braet

    Will Fedora publish hardware requirements for Silverblue? “rpm-ostree” extremely slowed down a Macbook Pro for example.

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