I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue on nearly all of my PCs for about a year now and overall it’s been great.
Automatic and unobtrusive updates for the core OS and user apps (everything happens in the background without interaction; flatpak updates are applied immediately, and OS updates are applied at next boot)
I can choose to apply many core updates immediately, but rarely do
Atomic OS updates means that everything must be installed successfully or none of the OS updates are applied, which prevents a partially updated system
Being an image-based distro, I can and do easily rebase to Fedora’s test/beta/remix releases, and just as easily rollback, or run both stable and beta releases side by side for testing purposes
Being image-based means there’s no chance of orphaned packages or library files being left behind after an update, resulting in a cleaner system over time
In the event that anything does go sideways after a system update (hasn’t happened yet), I can easily rollback to the previous version at boot
Some elements not unique to Silverblue but part of its common workflow:
Distrobox/toolbox allow you to run any other distro as a container, and then use that distro’s apps as if they were native to your host system; this includes systemd services, locally installed RPMs, debs, etc.; I use distrobox to keep most of my dev workflow within my preferred Archlinux environment
Flatpaks are the FOSS community’s answer to Ubuntu’s Snaps, providing universal 1-click installation of sandboxed user apps (mostly GUI based); Firefox, Steam, VLC, and thousands of other apps are available to users, all without the need for root access
My only complaints about Silverblue are more to do with how Flatpaks work right now, such as:
Drag & drop doesn’t work between apps, at least not for the apps I’ve attempted to use; for example, dragging a pic into a chat window for sharing; instead, I have to browse to and select the image from within the chat app
Firefox won’t open a link clicked within Thunderbird unless the browser is already open, otherwise it just opens a blank tab
Many flatpak apps are maintained by unofficial volunteers, and this isn’t always clear on Flathub; I view this as a security risk and would prefer to see a flag or warning of some kind when a flatpak is not maintained by the official upstream developer
That said, I’m confident that these issues will be addressed over time. The platform has already come a long way these past couple of years and now that the KDE and GNOME teams are collaborating for it, things will only get better.
Like I said though, overall Silverblue has been a really great user experience, and as a nearly 20-year Linux veteran it has really changed the way I view computing.