January 31, 2021 ~ 2 min read

Initial thoughts on Rawhide Silverblue 👋


So, by I guess some luck or some fine packaging by the Red Hat folks I managed to get not only Silverblue working but in-fact the Rawhide version of it. I have to say I was quite impressed, it booted into a GNOME desktop just fine and I could run firefox also, albeit without multimedia codecs and so on and thus it was a perfect way to learn about Red Hat's effort to make an immutable OSTree-driven packaged system. So far, I've managed to bootstrap my usual development and workstation-like workflow which includes a custom emacs with say, packages for doing rust and python programming in particular. Oh and also some stuff for interacting with clusters in Kubernetes, always a must-have right?

Anyway, one thing I would like to point out that I really like is this notion of the toolbox or rather, a kind of playground where you can use DNF to install all the stuff that could go wrong and you don't want to overtly layer too much on top of the immutable stuff for want of not wanting your system to be tainted in an otherwise nicely isolated immutable system. So that's in particular where I installed stuff like GCC, LLVM, ZSH and so forth which really don't have much to do with the big stuff like say, GNOME or say my flatpak packages.

I haven't managed to learn it all as this is day one but the moment caught me and I thought I'd note it down since I finally went through with it. I'm a big fan and it's also nice to see what's coming up in Fedora since for me it's the best workstation environment. Maybe I'm getting old but nowadays I want somewhere I can test things "safely" and can also just do work.

Well, that'll do for now. Thanks for reading, watkinsr out.


Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a software engineer from the UK. I've worked a startup previously where I made a pricing engine for a mobility hub as a service and now I'm at Amazon working on FireTV!