3 ms·

Isn't SilverBlue just Redhat's NixOS clone?

• 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  It's more of a "clone" of the update mechanism in recent versions of Android. By "clone" I mean it was cloned the other way around.
• SilverRed 5y ago
  SilverBlue is not a clone of any existing system. It's a brand new setup which treats the OS as read only layered images. A little bit like docker. The key feature is that you can roll back a failed update by simply mounting an older image. You can also allow the user to customize things by adding on extra layers and if anything ever goes wrong, you just boot without the users layers to restore a stock system. For consumer level hardware this is essential to make sure it never ends up "bricked". The average user can not and will not reinstall an OS manually so if the OS gets in a bad state, the whole device is ewaste now.
• er4hn 5y ago
  Not quite. Silverblue is based around flatpak's (containers) and composing your OS from a set of containers. NixOs is based on Nix, which doesn't use containers but links binaries against specific versions of dynamic libraries to resolve dependency issues and allow for reliable installations.
• Jasper_ 5y ago
  No, it's based on ostree for system distribution (which Colin had been developing since 2011), and using flatpak for applications. This had been a goal of the Red Hat desktop team for a while (see also: Stateless Linux from the 90s), but it took a long time for the community to realize the benefits. Other approaches here are the ChromeOS image style updates, CoreOS's image style updates, systemd's btrfs based OS distribution, and quite a few more throughout history. It's a good idea. Collabora's SingularityOS they built for Valve for the original SteamOS was going to use ostree, but for various reasons (poor ones), they didn't ship that.