After using Fedora Atomic for around a year, I’ve switched my mom over from Linux Mint. Since then a few years’ve gone by and there’s been no issues with automatic updates failing or not applying. That’s awesome compared to regular issues with dpkg errors because of shutdown/power loss while updating.

Obviously release upgrades still require manual intervention, but that’s an hour once a year for updating and testing if everything works as it should.

Personally I’ve switched to NixOS, because even with ublue image-based OS aren’t great for configuring window managers. In general, image-based OS are especially awesome for long-running, low maintenance systems. I wouldn’t want to use an OS which doesn’t provide some kind of rollbacks anymore (btrfs snapshots is the minimum).

Edit:

Do you feel it’s worth it to learn the nuances of their use?

Fedora Atomic is almost identical to regular Fedora, the difference is mostly how the root filesystem is managed:

The former are files from rpms get copied to an ostree image, which then gets mounted as the root file system.

For the latter dnf copies files from rpms to the root file system.

[…] did you manage to properly run AppImages […]

They always worked flawlessly on everything except NixOS (because of no FHS-layout). Through distrobox they should work on any distro.

[…] trying to install Outline VPN […]).

These kinds of not properly packaged apps are a big issue with ostree based systems. VPN provider apps need to be natively installed and usually aren’t available in repos.

I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

I switched to Silverblue and it is fine

I run Bazzite on a HTPC, and it’s great, but I’m still deciding what to put on my daily driver PC, which needs to be able to do things like gaming and coding. As you also pointed out, Fedora atomic distros don’t like VPN clients that aren’t already packaged neatly as an RPM.

In light of that, you can either try to build your own custom downstream derivation that pulls from the upstream image of your choice (Universal Blue has instructions and a template for doing this) and make customizations to the system at build time, go with something like Blue Build, or go for a traditional mutable distro.

I’ve been trying to get Private Internet Access to install at build time on my own custom attempt, but so far, it’s been a failure. I’ve also tried on other immutable distros that use ostree alternatives, and they’ve also failed. I may just have to concede the client and only use the preset OVPN configurations, or I may need to move onto mutable options.

I use Kinoite daily since over a year at least.

First learn how rpm-ostree works. I dont think you borked your install.

Appimages run normally. As helpers I recommend “AppMan” where you should use the mode for the local user

Checkout discussion.fedoraproject.org and the tags #atomic-desktops #silverblue #kinoite #rpm-ostree