rpm-ostree VS toolbox

I definitely agree that immutability offers considerable value in regards to improving security. But arguably it's insufficient to pull the win over mutable Fedora due to the losses caused by the inability to install the kernel-hardened package and the lack of UKI (Unified Kernel Image) support.

Issue: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/3944

Oversimplifying might have been the most sensible in this context. However, you might have gone a little bit too far as your description fits only NixOS, Guix and distros that utilize rpm-ostree.

here's the documentation of ostree (the package manager)

Now... this was VERY alarming to say the least, so I went online and did indeed find an issue on GitHub.

And there are still some issues with layering. Some packages that don't behave or follow standards will modify files in /usr/local, which isn't supported, so you simply won't be able to install them on Silverblue. I think it's the same for /opt as well. (https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/233) This means it fundamentally can't do everything Workstation can, which is unfortunate.

ublue is based off of fedora and rpm-ostree, which is what "CoreOS" is today.

What happened was old school CoreOS was A/B partition based: https://github.com/coreos/docs/blob/master/os/sdk-disk-parti...

My memory is hazy but here's how I remember it: After Red Hat acquired CoreOS they rebased the entire thing around rpm-ostree, which is the CoreOS people know today: https://coreos.github.io/rpm-ostree/

At the time there was some anxiety in the community as to what would happen, as there was no direct upgrade path from old CoreOS to new CoreOS. Theoretically if we all believed the kool-aid we were drinking it's just a redeploy, no pets!

Kinvolk came along, forked it, and made Flatcar Linux, which kept the A/B partitioning system, and more crucially, let you just change a config file and all your old CoreOS nodes would just move to Flatcar and then you were good to go. So now if you wanted to stay on the system you were comfortable with you could just use Flatcar. If the composability of rpm-ostree attracted you then new CoreOS have you covered. Red Hat deserves a hat tip here because in their documentation/blog they explicitly mentioned Flatcar as an option for people who wanted to stick with what they know, which I thought was cool and how I discovered it!

Later on Microsoft acquired Kinvolk and and then people raised eyebrows. I have not checked in a while but the folks involved continued to do their thing and run it like a good OSS project, hold public meetings, all that stuff.

I use both and they're both high quality.

Whenever I was looking at using CoreOS, I was somewhat disheartened that automatic reboots weren't built in: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831. Has this changed? I know zincati has maintenance window support, which would also be nice to have.

Doesn't look like it https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/1091

The team has both made a ton of effort switching off their proprietary Skia based rendering tech and adopting standard Wayland, and has put forward huge effort to making running incredibly well integrated real Linux containers just work.

The headline is true. ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment. But it obfuscates the details. It's a damned by omission statement. It has some really good sauce to help you not notice often, but it's not at all a Linux desktop environment one can regularly use. You can do a lot of Linux desktop-y things but only through well crafted special unique wrapped processes that mostly but not fully help mock & emulate a regular Linux desktop. Even though it now runs Wayland, the apps you want to run will have atypical intermediates up the wazoo.

And no one else uses any of this tech. ChromiumOs has so much interesting container tech, does such an interesting job making containers think they have a regular Linux / FreeDesktop environment. It's far far far far deeper virtualization than for example https://github.com/containers/toolbox . But you know what? Google has made zero effort to get these pieces adopted elsewhere. It's open source but not intended for use outside Chromium/ChromeOS. I respect & think ChromeOS is a quite viable Linux, and it's so much closer to the metal & more interesting, amazing tech, but my gods Microsoft has gone 300x further to establish wsl2 as a sustainable community effort folks could use & target, in a way that ChromiumOS has done nothing about.

It's sad how Google has transformed from a company that appreciated & worked with ecosystems, that drove things collectively forward, into an individual player that does their own things & delivers from on high. ChromiumOS is such an incredible effort, but it's so internernally drive & focused, and it's hard to believe in such a wildcat effort, even though it's so so good. It keeps coming into better alignment with Linux Desktop actual, but via shims and emulations that no one else cares about or which seems marketed elsewhere. And that inward focus makes the whole effort both so exceptional & promising, but suspect. Such a different nearby but alternative & separately governed universe. ChromiumOS/ChromeOS do excellent at faking being a Linux desktop, and wonderfully have increasingly drawn more strength from that universe, but are still wholly their own very distinct very separate very controller other space. In many ways that's great, secure, good, and miraculously transparently done. But it's still hard to really trust, being such a weird alien impostor, faking so much for end user apps, and there's tension in believing ChromeOS will keep straddling the rift in pro-user manifestations forever.

I'm really, really happy with my current setup of Fedora immutable + toolbox [0]. This tool lets you create containers that are fully integrated with the system, so you have acces to the entire Fedora repos, can run graphical apps, etc. while still having everything inside a container in your home directory. That means no Flatpak required. Highly recommended.

[0] https://containertoolbx.org

Seems like toolbox is also in this space; https://github.com/containers/toolbox

With Silverblue the core repos are very similar to what you'd have on regular Fedora. With more of a philosophical shift about where you're supposed to install things from. The idea being that the base OS is immutable and you keep it fairly minimal - even though you are technically free to install any of Fedora packages to it. And then you install user applications through Flatpak and toolbx. Where these more user space focussed applications are installed to your home directory and are sandboxed away from actual access to your OS. With iOS/Android style application permissions like "Give app permission to access camera" and "Give app permission to modify files in home directory". Allowing you even further customise the sandboxing of applications. Do you really want that app to have access to your microphone?

I'd probably try running it on the host system first. If you want to use your nvidia gpu inside toolbox, you would indeed need to install the drivers in the container: https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/116

Use toolbox on CentOS or Ubuntu if you want a Fedora environment with more up to date tools: https://containertoolbx.org/