(My changes included installing KDE Plasma 5, and maybe trying a few different login managers, i.e. gddm3/lightdm. Not much else!)
Of course, if you like learning how to customize and tinker, then these kinds of distributions probably make a whole lot more sense to you!
Complaining that rpm-ostree took 2 minutes to update 2 packages (rpm-ostree downloaded an entirely new pre-baked filesytem snapshot and applied it atomically) is completely missing the point, as is complaining about selinux after swapping out a bunch of system level stuff. This is like the antithesis of the use case for Silverblue, and an author who has somehow never had to build a package for anything but Arch (deb would be much worse) complaining about the difficulty of building RPMs to install/overlay on the host system, which is not the intended use case *anyway*, is silly.
I can assure you I've built packages for more than just Arch Linux, and that building RPMs was by far the most frustrating experience of all :)
Every now and then I give it a spin, but most IDEs aren't great at doing development inside of a container just yet, which makes it painful to work with.
In its current state I would recommend Silverblue to two classes of users:
1. Highly technical with a strong background in immutable systems and containerization.
2. Non-technical users whose app needs are completely fulfilled by Flathub.
The latter may require some assistance with initial setup, but if I needed to help a friend or family member maintain their computer then Silverblue would be my first choice.
After a few failed attempts at pre-partitioning in stable, then installing from testing, I gave up and tried Silverblue. Gotta admit, the lack of driver issues out of the box was refreshing!
Like any immutable distro, Silverblue has it’s quirks, but hardware support hasn’t been one of them in my recent experience.
As a Linux Mint user, obviously I don't know a ton about every distribution and all of the differences! (There's an implicit assumption there, that if you know a lot more, you might choose to customize a less "off the shelf" distribution, though I don't know if that is accurate!)
I'm just glad my Linux installation process didn't involve all the steps that this article included to get up and running and being able to use my computer. To be sure, they have used Linux for over a decade, and like things a certain way, so their pickiness leads to a lot of the tinkering! I'm just saying, personally, I don't want to dig that deep if I don't have to.
I still think it's funny that everyone is pointing out that it's about Silverblue, when it's in the title, and I didn't say anything to contradict that. What am I missing here?