ostree distros (Endless and Fedora)

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wove
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Joined: Mon May 04, 2020 4:47 pm

ostree distros (Endless and Fedora)

Post by wove »

I have been enjoying using Endless which is ostree based built upon Debian and I have been enjoying it. Fedora has SilverBlue which is ostree based and built on rpm package management. I gave that a look using the second drive I installed in the IdeaCentre. The differences between SilverBlue and Endless are; SilverBlue is built on stock Gnome desktop, while endless has created its own UI and SilverBlue comes with the tools to install system components and modify the base system, while Endless keeps them hidden.

Today Fedora released the beta of the upcoming Fedora 35 and this includes Fedora Kinoite which is the Plasma/KDE variety of SilverBlue. So I gave it look. It uses KDE/Plasma 5.22.4. Fedora maintains their own flatpak repository which mirrors the dnf software versions included in the Fedora KDE Spin. The Kinoite installer installs all the flatpak backend components so installing the KDE software via flatpak is not a much bigger download than using the dnf install. At the time of the beta though there is not much software in that repository. You can enable the regular flatpak repository, which contains more KDE software and generally the latest versions as well. Of course those rely on newer backends which does make the downloads bigger.

Overall KDE has not moved to flatpak as quickly as Gnome, so their are fewer offerings. I could not find either Konqueror, or Falkon available as a flatpak. I have always liked Fedora because they tend to stick very closely to upstream and Fedora has always seemed to me to be a bit snappier in usage than Debian based distros. And SilverBlue and Kinoite feel much the same. They are snappy and outside of the wallpaper they very much are inline with their upstream sources.

Fedora can be gotten at <https://getfodora.org> and Endless OS is at <https://endlessos.com>
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