Hey y’all! I’m new to this forum and am really interested in this project. Oh man… i thought Fedora Kinoite is gonna be my last OS modification but here we go again! This rabbit hole newer ends huh? 
So my question is, would it be better to wait for new installer to get a more stable and smooth installing experience?
Ideally it would also take 1-1.5 hour to setup as previous OS.
You can actually rebase to an image without reinstalling from Fedora Kinoite 
I’m not sure which image you are using but you can open the terminal right now and enter:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-main:latest
This would be install Universal Blue’s Kinoite image, and when it finishes, you can reboot into it.
I would also recommend entering:
sudo ostree admin pin 0
Which pins your current deployment if anything goes wrong.
Ublue’s full image list here.
If you want a clean installation and want to try a Universal Blue image, you should probably wait honestly. Lots of new things in the works, especially upstream, and it should only get better from here. Fedora’s current installer may force you to rebase anyways if it decides to kick you out.
Oh rebasing sounds interesting. Would it be possible to make a leap straight into Bazzite?
Also would rebasing delete all my files etc? Or is there a way where i can do some sort of backup and not have to go through hassles like reinstalling some of my apps, logging into services on the web etc.
Also unrelated question but it’s always sort of in back of my head: since Universal Blue / Bazzite are custom images, that means that they are on top of say… Kinoite right?
I’m asking cause i’m pretty big security and privacy fan and i’m wondering if by picking the gaming oriented image, would i sacrificy any of that?
You can rebase directly to Bazzite, yup. Your Home should be safe completely as are your containers, Flatpaks, etc. Backup your Home directory of any important personal files if you are afraid of data loss, but they should be untouched.
Yup, built right on top of Kinoite for the KDE images. As for security, there are a ton of new packages part of the image on Bazzite now. Keep in mind the RPM Steam package will be part of your host. I don’t know if you would exactly sacrifice security, but keep in mind there are way more packages installed in Bazzite over the Kinoite image.
By the way, there is an image with security in mind called secureblue. Not saying you have to go with this or you’re completely insecure without this image, but if you are interested in security you can give it a try in a VM and see how it is. Same with Bazzite, before going all the way in and rebasing.
I appreciate the replies! I’ve did heard about Secureblue and while a pretty nice direction, i wish it would be more holistic and not focus mainly on security while potentially sacrificing privacy.
Anyways, as of right now, i feel very safe and well on Kinoite. I actually feel more like getting into something gaming focused as i game almost daily and security etc. wise my threat model is of a normal citizen so i don’t think i need to go that far. Some convenience from Universal Blue would be great too like the automatic updates of the OS, flatpaks etc.
I do have to say it would be amazing to have a holistically hardened Kinoite that is also gaming focused and in general doesn’t sacrifice convenience that much. That would be a golden spot for me personally. Maaan if i were to be passionate and skilled on coding etc. maybe i could mix these two but i’m not sure my brain is made for such stuff.
Edit: i’ll be off to sleep but i’ll check back on tomorrow
In case it’s not clear, Bazzite would become your new host image instead of Kinoite. That is what’s meant by rebasing. The way that Bazzite is built is by customizing the uBlue Kinoite container image. It’s not that you’re keeping Kinoite as a host and then sprinkling Bazzite goodies on top. The whole image is swapped. And you can always rebase back to stock Kinoite. 
Image hopping is the future, lol
Ah i see, apologies for being confused as i’m still very new to Linux ecosystem and these options of changing distros, on top of desktop interfaces / spins, on top of custom images, on top of rebasing of customized custom image lol.
I do love the options and Linux rocks but i still need to get better hang of that stuff. Both of your info really helped me with that. Thank you!
Just to be clear. Home directory stays the same with both, Kinoite and Bazzite in this case?
During rebase only image is changing ?
I’ve done the rebase today and lost no installed apps or browser data. The icons were in the same place and i was like ‘‘Wait… that’s it? It’s done??’’ I honestly feel like on surface nothing changed besides the boot logo change and i’ll likely feel the convenience of automatic updates of the os and apps in coming days.
Edit: oh and of course first time setup was there and it suggested me some cool apps that i didn’t know about beforehand. The first time setup appeared again after reboot but i just closed it.
If something were to go bad i could simply come back to Kinoite easily. So if i were to compare it to something, it’s like you are downloading a mod for your game. The base game stays the same but the mod is on top and it might tweak certain things that aren’t that easy to spot unless you see the changelog. Like a QoL mod.
Yup, home directory and flatpaks remain. The host image is swapped for another one but the data on the device remains. That’s one of the benefits that’s built into OSTree - your data is separated from the host system so that the host system can be swapped and updated atomically.
In this case you are right, but only in that the experience is intentionally designed that way. Kinoite works one way and the image you rebased to happened to have been built on Kinoite while only adding gamer goodies. The two images happened to be similar.
If you rebased to uBlue Silverblue or even another custom image that doesn’t start from uBlue, it’s possible that the host system would look and work differently from Kinoite. From a technical perspective you only need rpm-ostree to be able to rebase.
It’s a cool thing, but you just want to check how different a custom image is before rebasing to it.
Ah yeah, you’re right! So i guess a better comparison is you have a:
So if i were to rebase into GNOME desktop it definitely would’ve looked differently as there would be more changes added into the image, thus the image part would ‘‘cover’’ previous desktop environment.
Now i wonder if the icons added to the taskbar would’ve stayed. I can imagine stuff like browsers if not changed, would stay the same without a need for any setups.
It is really cool and i’d much rather settle on one good distro and then modify it from there with rebases. Sounds more like building on top of something, rather than continuously starting adjacently and from scratch.
potentially sacrificing privacy.
(secureblue maintainer here): To be clear, secureblue doesn’t “sacrifice privacy” in any sense. We simply exclude from our scope any changes that are security theater masquerading as “privacy” improvements.
I see you’re on quite a few forums I’m late with the reply but i did also note your similar reply on Techlore. Thanks again for providing valuable knowledge.