Fedora Silverblue

Fedora Silverblue is an immutable Linux distro, based on Fedora Linux, that uses rpm-ostree. It ships a near-vanilla GNOME experience by default, and package management is generally done via Flatpak applications or containerized environments like Toolbx.

I personally use Fedora Silverblue as my operating system of choice for my primary laptop, and really love it’s mix of modernity and stability, as well as the Flatpak + containers workflow it holds me to using.

Useful Software

Package Manager

• Flatpak — Gets you a wide selection of the latest applications, and can install without a restart unlike rpm-ostree

Containers/Dev Environments

• Distrobox — I feel that distrobox is far more of a complete and efficient solution for running containers than the included Toolbx

Tips and Tricks

Theming

Honestly, it’s not worth trying to theme Fedora Silverblue. As is, GNOME gets less and less themable by the release, and add in an immutable filesystem and juggling container applications and it becomes a real pain.

Hiding/Removing Built-In Firefox

By default on Fedora Silverblue, Firefox is installed as an overlaid RPM package. However, this isn’t ideal, as it makes codec installation very difficult and updates slower. Therefore, we really want the Flatpak version, more specifically the one from Flathub. However, we then have two desktop entries labelled “Firefox”, which isn’t ideal.

The first way this can be done is by hiding the desktop entry of the built-in Firefox, so that we can just pretend it isn’t there. We can achieve this with the following commands (pulled from this Fedora documentation page):

sudo mdkir -p /usr/local/share/applications/
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop /usr/local/share/applications/
sudo sed -i "2a\\NotShowIn=GNOME;KDE" /usr/local/share/applications/firefox.desktop
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/

Alternatively, if we don’t care about whether it impacts updates or anything later, and just want it fully off our system, we can completely remove the RPM package with the following command:

rpm-ostree override remove firefox firefox-langpacks

After a restart, the Firefox RPM should be gone.