j0rge @ j0rge @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Been there and done that. It's better to just not have the host OS break in the first place.

My Ubuntu installs are extremely reliable, both on desktops and servers.

Probably because you're an experienced user, not everyone has the same skillset.

mozillavpn

I would just overlay this, that's what it's there for, there's no need to do a full new image for VPN stuff.

We use quadlets to manage those containers: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html

As others in the thread have pointed out just having systemd manage them is the way to go, it's a nice combo!

What package is it?

If you kept a basic minimal Ubuntu host it would be trivial to maintain.

That's not true for most people.

I just don’t see the point. You want new users to understand containers.

You don't need to understand containers unless you're using the system for development -- which in Linux land means containers.

Most people aren't system administrators and they end up with broken computers for the most basic tasks. It's one of the major reasons why people hate using Linux desktops.

And even if you're an experienced sysadmin you can't account for the entropy that accumulates on traditional OSes. 18.04 -> 20.04 -> 22.04 doesn't end up being the same as a 22.04 clean install. This is a huge problem, especially for people who don't know how to manage linux systems. And the people who do manage systems at scale don't want that behavior either.

I go over this in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5xNLH-5eA

But day to day I'm in an ubuntu container and using "normal" package management, I just don't do it on the host.

You use containers for your tooling, you purposely don't touch the host operating system, that's the entire point.

Yeah those don't go on your host they go in containers.

Flatcar linux (this is what I use for my NAS/homeserver) and CoreOS are both good.

edit: OpenSUSE has microOS: https://microos.opensuse.org/

I am unsure of the status of KDE offhand, I'm getting a bit north of 5 hours when on a plane and on wifi.

I would love to find some script or tool that can just grab all my logs and chart them out so people can share their results in a more reliable manner because I suck at keeping track of this kind of stuff by hand.

I work on this image and daily drove it for a while. It's basically Matt Hartley's TLP power recommendations out of the box (we collaborated on this, he's the Linux support person at Framework)

I have an intel FW13 and now prefer the newer gnome-power-profile that we ship instead of the TLP-based recommendations. It has all the latest patches from upstream and it works great on both AMD and Intel systems. I don't personally have an AMD Framework but we have enough people using it to know that the gnome-power-profile setup is awesome thanks to AMD's contributions to gnome-power-profile.

Ideally a Framework image shouldn't need to exist --- to make things more complicated Fedora is considering switching to tuned which is another, third power manager which should unify the stack. Universal Blue is currently testing this in the bazzite:testing branch of that custom image and we're hoping to get that feedback back to Framework. Hope this helps!

Maybe make that clear when someone opens the host terminal on bluefin, or let the bluefin installer give this info to the user.

We're working on a dynamic motd system that will give you some guidance when you first run the terminal. Here's the issue if you have some feedback! https://github.com/ublue-os/bluefin/issues/609

So which one should I use now?

Yeah the reason it's ubuntu by default is that's what the target audience uses, but we've been working on a wolfi/brew distrobox that ends up being a better experience, so we're mulling shipping that by default.

Also, why prefer homebrew over something like nix? AFAIK, homebrew leads to the same dependency issues that the traditional package managers have.

We picked homebrew because it's overwhelmingly the most popular package manager for cloud people and has everything people need. nix doesn't really fit in a container world, but we don't stop people from using it, and with devbox there's at least a common devcontainer pattern people can use. I haven't really run into dependency issues with homebrew but the new bluefin-cli container maintains state and is destroyed/rebuilt regularly so that hopefully won't be a problem.

scattered on the ublue website, blog posts and forum posts.

Yeah this is annoying and we're in the middle of consolidating docs, I'm hoping to streamline it by Fedora 40. I'm also working on a 10m "how to use this thing" video, it's just been hard to spend time on it when we're still making it. We're almost feature complete at this point so I'll start on this soon.

Your starter steps are exactly what we want the default to be, do you think we should say that more strongly? Thanks for your feedback! I think we can clean up a bunch of this stuff to make it easier.

ublue contributor here. We're set up so you can install any cli program from any distro transparently. Should we outline that more in our docs?

the package entropy over time will get me the very dependency issues that Flatpak wants to solve.

You can declare your distroboxes so that they get created regularly from scratch instead of upgrading in place: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-assemble.md

That way the entropy never hits you. Then use the Prompt terminal https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt to make it just part of your terminal ootb.

I didn't use any flatpaks on the workstation install. I'm about three years with this setup on 4 computers through multiple OS updates, works great.

Author here. The distro comes with the filesystem compression and deduplication already set up and I don't need to manage it, so of course I'm going to use it.

Given the cost of storage I have no problems spending a barely noticeable amount of space to use flatpaks given all the problems they solve.

I'm the author of the blog post and a former sysadmin, there's really no maintenance to do with flatpaks, not having to deal with traditional package manager issues have removed that problem completely from my life.

Distros may or may not provide this functionality, but on my systems they're set up for zero maintenance of the OS base image and the flatpaks via service units and then I don't have to do anything.

Here maybe it's easier if I just paste in the differences:

• Ubuntu-like GNOME layout.
  • Includes the following GNOME Extensions:
    • Dash to Dock - for a more Unity-like dock
    • Appindicator - for tray-like icons in the top right corner
    • GSConnect - Integrate your mobile device with your desktop
    • Blur my Shell - for that bling
• GNOME Software with Flathub:
  • Use a familiar software center UI to install graphical software
• Built on top of the the Universal Blue main image
  • Extra udev rules for game controllers and other devices included out of the box
  • All multimedia codecs included
  • System designed for automatic staging of updates
    • If you've never used an image-based Linux before just use your computer normally
    • Don't overthink it, just shut your computer off when you're not using it
• Starship is enabled by default to give you a nice shell prompt
• Solaar - included for Logitech mouse management along with libratbagd
• Tailscale - included for VPN along with wireguard-tools
• zsh and fish optional
• Built-in Ubuntu user space

• <kbd>

  Ctrl

  </kbd>

  -

  <kbd>

  Alt

  </kbd>

  -

  <kbd>

  u

  </kbd>

  - will launch an Ubuntu image inside a terminal via Distrobox and your home directory will be transparently mounted for the Ubuntu image to access
• A BlackBox terminal is used just for this configuration
• Use this container for your typical CLI needs or to install software that is not available via Flatpak or Fedora
• Optional ubuntu-toolbox image with Python, and other convenience development tools. just distrobox-bluefin to get started. To configure just follow the guide.
• Optional universal image with Python, Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, Java, C#, F#, .NET Core, PHP, Go, Ruby, and and Conda. just distrobox-universal to get started
• just assemble shortcut to declaratively build distroboxes defined in /etc/distrobox/distrobox.ini
• Refer to the Distrobox documentation for more information on using and configuring custom images
• GNOME Terminal -

  <kbd>

  Ctrl

  </kbd>

  -

  <kbd>

  Alt

  </kbd>

  -

  <kbd>

  t

  </kbd>

  - will launch a host-level GNOME Terminal if you need to do host-level things in Fedora (you shouldn't need to do much).

The difference between silverblue and your image is that silverblue is signed by fedora and yours isn’t.

Of course Fedora only signs Fedora images, we sign our own images.

There’s no reason for anyone but you to use the image. Even if I were to us tailscale and fish, I’d be better off with silverblue.

Then use Silverblue! If you don't understand the features of something then you might not be the target audience!