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?
No Atomic systems make all sense.
They are literally the reason why an unstable distro like Fedora is robust.
Customization is all done on the mutable areas, home partition etc. A new user profile equals a new vanilla desktop.
Yes, you cannot mess with the core architecture of the OS. Things need to be centralized.
But you realize, similar to GNOME removing theming, that if you have one way that everyone can test, you have way less bugs.
As a KDE user I would be really fine having way less customizability and more stability. I am very fine with the default in most cases.
A well designed system does not require customization, and to be an OS used by the world, Linux needs good defaults.
I agree that this is a very valid reason but I don’t think most of the people see their OS that way
Which is still irrelevant for OPs thread. It is actually the opposite. The more you diverge from upstream, the more you need to vendor your changes.
That means if your mums PC breaks, you are responsible ;)