One of the things I really like about image-based OSs is that the “happy path” is for all desktop GUI applications to be installed via Flatpak (I’m a huge Flatpak fan, sue me), and so in my personal opinion it might be a good idea to go all-in on that, like openSUSE Aeon has done, by having an absolute minimum of GUI apps installed by default into the core image, to really focus on Flatpak’ing everything.
One of the things that sort of niggles me about the Fedora Atomic family is that they come with Firefox and a lot of the GNOME GUI apps installed as RPMs onto the core image, instead of as Flatpaks, when you really don’t need them to be. It’s not like you need any of them installed from the get-go to have a functioning system you can install things on like you do with the Terminal and Software Center apps.
It’s not a big deal, but it is this annoying little inconsistency that unless I mess with layering myself, I’ll always have these exception applications whose version is tied to my OS image version and which don’t abide by the rules of the other apps I have.
Otherwise, I just want to say that I’m loving ublue-os/nvidia so far, it’s been a pretty great experience, despite my troubles with Wayland!
It’s not that difficult for even a fairly non-technical person to spin up their own image that doesn’t contain those things, if you don’t mind putting a little work in.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m already planning on doing that in fact (I’m very technical, I just need to wait for health to get out of the way and I have some time on my hands). I’m just trying to think about what the best defaults would be, and in my opinion if we want to encourage people to create their own images, we probably want a base image that contains everything you definitely need to have in the core image, but nothing you don’t, so that it works better as a foundation for people to build on. For the most part I think the balance ublue has struck is perfect — the major exception to that for me is the default installed applications.
I’m kind of on the other side where I would like to have some creature comforts installed on atomic images. I don’t like that stock Kinoite doesn’t come with a camera app or a calculator out of the box, for example. I think that generally Fedora nails the default apps and I actually wish more of them would stick around on the stock images.
So it ends up being a balancing act that has to average out over several use cases. Good thing these are editable as uBlue has shown!
That’s fair enough. I’m planning to create a minimalist GNOME+nvidia+System76 image for myself, then. Once I figure out how silverblue-nvidia is adding GNOME to base-nvidia so I can do it right. I’m not a devops gal!