Yeah, I run Silverblue and I never watch back to common distro any more. They say there is a learning curve and they are not for novices… That is absolutely not true, they are easier and the only thing you learn is layering packages, which is same as installing packages in every distro with CLI in terminal lol, what learning curve?

There is no much difference, you just install less shit into the system and basically go 100% flatbox.

I found most of info. Using btrfs snapshots in Silverblue is possible, but you need lots of preparations before installing it (like in Fedora Workstation, but even more), and even if you did, it would be pointless, as Silverblue allready does same job with ostree overlays pretty good. Using both is not good idea, unless you really need to break up something). It is possible to layer snapper and use snapshots with home, so you may rollback any file or changes very quick, but I am allready making backups of home dayli with dejadup, everything is saved to cloud and if I mess some files, I can rollback any file any day back. To keep things simple it is really enough. Silverblue is cool 😁

No. I see you are somewhat obsessed with ostree. Think about btrfs like fstree. It is way more powerful. The entire btrfs filesystem is kind an ostree. I used Workstation before Silverblue and I could rollback entire os back to days, without home folder, if I need too. But that does not make it immutable right? There is a btrfs-grub, which allows to rollback to any pinned snapshot. If something goes wrong in Workstation you just rollback.

Edit. As Fedora uses btrfs by default (but you can use ext4 too) I also thought about btrfs rollbacks. I actually forgot to examine it, as Fedora docs say something about it, like they should not be used together, I did not read why exactly.

With btrfs you can do way more, than ostree offer. Like install some package, do something, than just rollback system as nothing happened at all. You can rollback parts of system, like any folder. You may compare differences up to single files. Easy. You can rollback months back! That is what Micro OS about, rollback anything at any time with ease. Common user just do not need it.

How are they similar? Aeon rely on btrfs to work, that is simple and good approach, but less user-friendly? I did not tried it, after comparing Aeon and Silverblue I was confident enough Aeon is not for me. And Vanilla has some complex A/B partitions swapping, like Android does, not sure how it will work, but documentation is really confusing.

I recently switched to Silverblue, somewhat accidentally, as I did not thought immutable distros a mature enough, that was an expirement to dig it myself. Guess what? It is really awesome, I do not watch back to common distros now. I also believe Silverblue is way easier and better for Linux novices, than Mint, which is indeed also good and user-friendly, but future of linux seems to be immutability and flatpaks. There is a KDE variant as well. OpenSUSE has Micro OS with another approach to immutability and Vanilla OS is coming soon with yet one more different approach. I guess there are more allready and there will be more and more.

Addons are loaded to memory, the more addons you use the slower it will behave. There is a security issue too, addons have a lot of permissons, you need to trust them, while filter lists are plain simple text. And last, there are browsers, which allow to add filterlists, but not addons.

Fedora Workstation has nice GUI apps store. Fedora Silverblue is even more kiss, Flatpaks based.

You really do not need it. Just add their filterlist to uBo https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt

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Maybe it looks more complex under the hood, but actually it is easy. And it is incredibly easy as ‘for user’, I am not going back to common distro now. I see no issue to install layered app/packages I need often (rare ones are in toolbox, which is also easy) and casual user won’t even need it.

Edit. I also understand btrfs concept, I used it in workstation, but that is complex thing, common user won’t deal with it.

Thanks, makes sense.

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There is a flatpak app SaveDesktop, which saves your desktop config in a file. Like extensions lists and settings, gnome shell and dconf settings, GTK, icons, fonts, themes folders, other flatpak apps list (without settings and data) and also nautilus extensions (but not scripts). Than you can easily load it back, apps will be installed, etc.

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