Dont worry. No the setup is easy, just follow these exact steps:

• download a silverblue iso from their website
• flash it to a usb stick using fedora media writer from the same website
• install it: use recommended partition layout, I recommend to encrypt the disk, set keyboard language etc.
• the silverblue install has very little steps, reboot after finished and in the GNOME desktop you will finish the setup.
• directly after finishing, open Ctrl+Alt+T (or the terminal from the app menu) and rebase to ublue

# backup the current version
sudo ostree admin pin 0

# change to ublue but unsigned (temporary)
rpm-ostree rebase --reboot ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-main:latest #assuming you dont have nvidia

after reboot, open terminal again and run this

# rebase to the signed image
rpm-ostree rebase --reboot ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-main:latest

Thats it, ublue takes care of all the rest. It adds the Flathub Flatpak repository where you get your apps.

If you want apps that need to by on the system (a vpn app, some terminal tools, a different terminal, editor, filemanager etc) you can install them with rpm-ostree install NAME but note that this will slow down updates. I do this with about 18 packages.

Updates for Flatpak apps and the system are done in the background, install and forget.

If you want to use Ubuntu, Arch, Opensuse, Debian apps safely, without breaking your system, use distrobox.

distrobox create Ubuntu -i #press tab

If you are in the default bash shell, you will get a list of images where you can see all the available container images. This allows you to use apps for any distro on your system, and they are not in a VM and have native performance.

This is typically used for programming (IDE, language, etc.) or compiling, or installing stuff like QGis or RStudio which are not working as Flatpak. I wrote a QGis Distrobox guide on their website, should be merged by now, for RStudio I can write another one (it downloads addons using the dnf package manager which only works on non-atomic fedora and generally is a mess)

Often you will not need Distrobox for regular stuff, if you dont do these things.

Dont install random apps that write to the system, which will not work anyways. Search for RPMs on rpmfusion (already added in ublue), COPR, OpenbuildService etc. You need RPMs for the current fedora version.

You can install GNOME extensions through the firefox addon and the flatpak extension manager.

When there is an update like Fedora 40 coming soon, wait a few weeks or months. Fedora supports 2 versions, the old one (currently 38) and the current one (currently 39). 39 will become the old one and get updates until half a year or so, and it will be more stable. 40 will get the latest stuff like GNOME 46 or Plasma6 (on the Kinoite image) and thus have more breakages.

Ublue cant upgrade for some reason, so if you hear about the new version, wait a bit and run

rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/silverblue-main:latest

Again. If you want to be sure, this is how you make backups

# show your images
rpm-ostree status

# 0,1,2,3 are from newest to latest, up to down. The image with the • is currently used.

# save the currently used version
sudo ostree admin pin 0

# remove the saved version
sudo ostree admin pin -u 1