I’ve been using linux for some time now.1 In that time I’ve bounced back and forth between a few different distros (mostly Mint, Fedora, and NixOS). Now, at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve started using Fedora Silverblue. As I go along, I’ve been writing this post to describe my experience.
Installation
It’s 2025 and installing most linux distributions is pretty easy. I downloaded the ISO from fedoraproject.org, copied it to a flash-drive, and booted into the installer. I wasn’t planning on doing anything fancy with my disks so I just did an automatic partion of my main drive. The only issue I encountered was that the installer crashed when I enabled third-party repositories so I had to restart once. Once that was done though- voila, fresh computer.
Files
A wise man once said, “Why do you wonder that distro-hopping does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.”2 A new installtion is clean of your mess, but my files are my mess so I’m going to take them with me! The installation process wiped my main disk, but I had used restic to make a backup of my files to my secondary hard drive (as well as to a flash drive, just in case). Restic is available in rpm-ostree, but I installed it using Nix to avoid unnecessarially layering packages.
Nix
Nix is a very useful piece of software, especially for Silverblue. It let’s you install a huge variety of programs without layering them with rpm-ostree. It also allows me to use my existing Home Manager configuration. This lets me install many of the programs I use and manage my configuration files with one tool. Unfortunately, even though Nix works perfectly fine, the installer is current broken on Fedora 42.
Argentblua
Fortunately, my friend also has a Silverblue distribution called Argentblua which fixes the installer issue (and has other benefits). I did a simple rpm-ostree rebase and the Nix installer was ready to go. I forked Argentblua to add Sway and Rofi, and that’s pretty much it for the basic setup.
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Foreshadowing: A literary device whereby an author drops hints or symbolic representations of plot developments to come later in the story.3
At least 6 years based on my Github history, which is a pretty long time when you’re 21. ↩︎
In Letters from a Stoic letter 28, Seneca attributes the following to Socrates: “Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.” ↩︎