My personal laptop runs bluefin-dx, while my family's computers run some version of Debian. On those computers I've very recently had to go in and perform some post-update surgery to fix things that updates broke. This has thankfully been something that doesn't happen frequently, but all the same, I can't wait until we upgrade their hardware and I switch them over to bluefin. Automatic updates on immutable images is the way to go for the future of the Linux desktop.
I used to be against automatic updates, but bluefin changed my mind. I draw a distinction between *installing* software (exerting control over what runs on my computer) and *updating* already-installed software, which is a maintenance task.
I *had* to update manually in the past, because updates sometimes broke things, and knowing what changed made regressions easier to troubleshoot.
Updates are more reliable on immutable systems, so I'm comfortable delegating/automating package maintenance.
@kyle ah yes. That makes sense. One thing I always hated about Fedora was the requirement to reinstall like every 6 months or whatever since Redhat doesn’t really care and Fedora is just their testing playground and a release based model. Can bluefin just be upgraded perpetually?
@rbrown Yup, because it's image-based and immutable, the base OS image can automatically update (safely!) in the background, and by default it does. Your userspace apps are all flatpaks and those update automatically in the background (by default) as well. If there ever *were* some sort of issue with an update, their CI system ideally would catch it before it got pushed out, but if a regression did get on your system you could just revert to the previous, working image. Pretty slick.
@rbrown @kyle That sounds like you never used Fedora at all, since you can:
- upgrade to the newest release every 6 months
- use a release until it goes EOL and then update to the newest release, so updating every year
- use the latest-1 release as a sort of LTS and upgrade every 6 months
There's never been a need to reinstall, but yeah, our Atomic editions make upgrading a reboot away and bluefin (and other Universal Blue variants) make things even easier
@rbrown I stopped using Qubes *personally* when I started using a Librem 5 as a laptop. Of course I was using Qubes *professionally* at that time.
I tested bluefin on a mini PC a number of months ago and really liked the experience and starting using it as a personal desktop for video meetings. Recently I decided I wanted to use bluefin-dx full time and set up a laptop w/ it. I don't really need the security guarantees Qubes provides for my personal computing right now.