Been using Fedora Silverblue since its release and it's absolutely the future. ostree is what everyone should be using.
For example, I was using a script written by an ubuntu user that was looking for a library with the name/location ubuntu puts it in. Fedora uses a different name for the library. My instinct here is to create a symbolic link with the Ubuntu name that points to the Fedora rpm managed library. Instead, to get it to work I forked the script, got it to build locally, made it look for either library name, ran local test cases, submitted the code as a PR upstream, etc etc etc. It took something that would normally cost me 1 line of shell to fix to something that took 90 minutes.
Even before I switched to Silverblue I was known to create Ubuntu containers to run tools from there.
That's what you should have done, run it in a container. If you're not comfortable with containers then the workflow in Silverblue will feel very strange.
I sympathize, but also AIUI this is exactly the sort of monkey patching that these systems are trying hard to avoid; yes, it fixes your immediate problem, but it leaves an undocumented, unmanaged change in how your system finds libraries. In my personal experience, this is the kind of change that leads to machines growing weird behavior that ends when I give up and so a clean reinstall.
1. With Fedora Silverblue 39 the most straightforward way is to add a Dockerfile layer just which makes your changes directly to the base image.
2. You can also create your own RPM and make the changes there.
3. Best is to actually run your script in an Ubuntu container (distrobox, toolbx, or podman).
Does that put the onus on you to rebuild container image in order to receive system updates?
How do you keep track of your custom modifications to /usr or /bin without using the package manager? Do you record them somewhere for reference?
I read a quora answer that estimated the Windows OS development budget at around 18 billion dollars, based on salaries. Imagine if Red Hat invested 2bn into Fedora to make it the Firefox of the desktop OS world. Just a 10% share is very significant against Microsoft.
They've come so far with so little, on the back of thousands of open source packages. That money could be used to keep those projects alive, and to sponsor them while they're being developed. Red Hat employees are already involved in a lot of them.
Redhat could invest 200bn into Fedora or any other project, and still people won't switch to it because even if it's "better" by some arbitrary metric, it's not what people are used to.
It's definitely possible, but it looks like Linux is more likely to gain popularity via WSL than via Fedora or similar.
And most of those people will use Windows at home, too, if for no other reason than to not have to learn how to use two different desktop systems.
Is this one of those things designed for career sysadmins/system builders only?
https://opendev.org/starlingx/apt-ostree is one such effort to bring ostree to debian.
You might find their forum (intended for end users, not much about development) or some of their repos useful:
I'd be awesome if there was a community effort around bringing the layering functionality and bootc enablement to all of Debian and then we could have our cake and eat it too!
I currently use Ubuntu for my server, and I see there's ostree in my repos, I haven't gotten around to trying it yet but I'd like to just start versioning my system as is with it. If that's too difficult/not possible to do, then I intend to switch my server over to Silverblue at some point because I really like the idea behind ostree.
The other reason is snapshots, because no system is perfect. An operating system should in fact be designed around the fact that something will go wrong. Windows has had this for years, and some linux users have done it with btrfs.
But Fedora Silverblue does it seamlessly with ostree and grub, so if something does go wrong in a newly applied update, you simply choose the last working one in the grub menu and go on with your day until you have time to resolve it.
This for me to use Fedora as my daily driver is crucial.