Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love Fedora Atomic (Silverblue, Bazzite, Kinoite, Aurora, IOT, etc.), more than any other distro I used, and I plant to continue using it.

It never made any problems on any of my devices, and because it is pretty much indestructible and self-managing, I even planned to install it on my Mum’s new laptop, in case her current one (basically a toaster with Mint on it) breaks.

But with the last days, my trust is damaged quite a bit.

First one, where I couldn’t update anymore on uBlue, because of faulty key pairs. This is a huge thing for me because uBlue updates in the background, and if I wouldn’t have read it here on Lemmy, I would have found out way too late, which is a security risk imo.

And now, my devices weren’t able to boot anymore due to some secure boot stuff. Again, if I wouldn’t have subscribed the Fedoramagazine, I would have noticed it way too late.
I was able to just boot into an older image and just paste a few commands from the magazine’s post, and it was resolved in just seconds (download time not included).

Both instances were only a minor thing for ME.
But both would have been a headache if I wouldn’t follow those blogs, which is a thing only nerds (like myself) do.
Nobody else cares about their OS, it is supposed to just work, hence why I use Atomic.

I don’t wanna blame the devs (both j0rge/ uBlue and the Fedora team), they were very quick, transparent and offered very simple fixes.
And, being able to just boot into an older image, just in case, is something I am very thankful for, but nothing I want to depend on.

Having to be informed about stuff like this and then having to use the CLI is just a no-go for most people.

Am I over-reacting about this too much? What’s your view on those things?

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    My takeaway was add https://universal-blue.discourse.group/tag/announcements.rss to my rss reader (already had fedora) and I’m happy I’ll know when I need to, still for those of us who support non-technical users on these platforms it is indeed problematic.

    OTOH, this is the first time I’ve had non-nvidia (sleep broken on my desktop, just rolled back and held updating for a while, no big deal) update problems in two years, which is pretty outstanding for a new rolling distro, and gives me confidence in the architecture. Shit happens I guess, but it was quickly and publicly sorted, also trust building…

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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      4 months ago

      This should be done out of the box. The implementation depends on the desktop.

      Which is why for quality assurance, at most 2 desktops should be supported and prioritized like that.