• @gpstarman
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    2 months ago

    I’m totally new to Atomic Desktops. How rebasing differs from installing fresh OS?

    And what exactly is rebasing though?

    • Luden [comrade/them]
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      2 months ago

      Think of it like you have a base OS that is stock, like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. Then the different ublue offerings, Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite/Ucore take those and add new things on top. If you rebase, anything you installed as a user isn’t touched. But all of the addons change to whatever the default is for that ublue variant.

      So someone rebasing from Bluefin/Aurora to Bazzite will have Lutris and Steam (and other gaming specific software and system tweaks) automatically ‘layered’ as part of the default experience, since Bazzite is targeted primarily at gaming, and the other two for general desktop use.

      You’re swapping out the default system image, just like when you update and the update is actually just replacing your entire OS with the new version (until the feature that let’s them only replace things that have changed gets finished).

      • @gpstarman
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        12 months ago

        Thank You.

        Bluefin/Aurora/Bazzite/Ucore take those and add new things on top.

        I can’t understand this though. So, Bazzite is built on top of Fedora SIlverblue/Kionite?

        • Luden [comrade/them]
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          2 months ago

          Yes. They use the official Fedora atomic images as their base, then add things from there. Silverblue/Bluefim has GNOME and Kinoite/Aurora/Bazzite has KDE. Then they just have more stuff that Fedora can’t or won’t ship, such as built-in proprietary drivers for Nvidia GPUs without any extra repos or downloads, and the Xone driver for Xbox Wireless Controllers.

          You could technically do all of this yourself, but it’d be a lot of work and be slower. For Ublue, a lot of things are on the image, as in baked into the OS as part of the iso and standard install. For things you layer yourself, the OS has keep track of what is stock and what isn’t, then act accordingly with each update. So the more things you personally layer versus installing through their preferred methods like Distrobox, Brew, or Flatpak, the longer the system takes to update. Layering some stuff like Steam is also not straightforward, so its beneficial to have a system that has most of the things you need. The phrase they like to use is crowdsourcing your OS. If everyone has mostly the same base OS, support is easier, bugs are fixed faster, etc.

          They follow the main release schedule of Fedora but frequently contribute things upstream and take their own approach by integrating things from Nobara, ChimeraOS, and OpenSUSE’s Aeon/Kalpa. Folks from those groups collaborate back and forth.