How can immutable Fedora be used in dual boot? (other systems are later installed? - a new drive with them added back later?)

,

As I am looking for a stable and bug-free Plasma 5 system (after a lot of testing) I have not yet found the balance between new and stable. Plasma desktop is still full of small old bugs that are only fixed in newer versions etc. (I am in fact stuck with Kubuntu LTS, which is stable but full of small annoying bugs; trying Fedora KDE 34 and 35, Suse KDE, and a few other KDE systems, the advantages I could hope to get — and/or got — were not outbalancing enough, so to speak…)

Anyway I am very curious about Kinoite and the immutability concept as intended for more stable, less prone to bugs systems. I am most hopeful given the fact that the bugs I am concerned with were almost never present during the first period of use of the desktop: immutability might be the solution if Plasma stays untouched.

(By the way: isn’t any per user customization possible, like theme and shortcuts changes?)

But dual boot is a must for me too. I understand immutability and dual-boot cannot match.

Why is that exactly?

And what would happen if I simply tried to install Kinoite as if it were a normal system?

Would Kinoite installation fail or otherwise not work? or would the other systems be compromised? Would it make a difference if Kinoite were installed on a second drive?

All my systems (Windows 10 and Kubuntu) are now on the same drive, but I have a second larger one with no operating systems.

If I physically remove the first drive, I could install Kinoite on the second with no problems, true?

What if I install Kinoite in this way but at a later time I add back the first drive with Windows etc?

Hello @cipricus ,
In a word yes, you can multi-boot Silverblue and Kionite, but there are difficulties and caveats to be aware of. A good place to start looking it https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation/, in particular you have to do manual partitioning in order to achieve this goal. Also, from past experience I found that I needed to install the other OS before installing Silverblue for multiboot to work correctly.

Themes and such are usually stored in areas that are writable by the OS, such as your home directory under ~/.config say. Well, plasma is not likely to stay untouched. You’re currently using a LTS version of Unbuntu which is basically frozen in time. Fedora, and Linux in general, is constantly being improved upon by the community. This will as a natural consequence create regular changes to occur. It is important to remember Fedora Linux tests those changes and they must pass in order to be able to release, if the change would render the system inoperable as a result, this would block release until it was resolved.
An advantage of an Atomic OS such as Silverblue and Kionite is that if an update “breaks something” on your system, you can rollback to your previous system commit and continue working while sorting out the new update, or letting the community sort it out.

2 Likes

You mean trying to install Kinoite (especially if I’ll do it on a separate drive with a separate EFI) wouldn’t involve bigger risks overall than the installation of other Linuxes (let’s say Fedora proper, Suse, Solus etc)?

I tried to dual boot Fedora 31 and Silverblue 31 Dual boot Fedora31 and SilverBlue Fedora31 - #2 by sampsonf

I mean that rpm-ostree systems like Kionite and Silverblue handle the boot loader subtly different. So for instance, a lot of users come to Fedora Linux or other Distro even when they are searching for something different than Win10 say. But it is a substantial commitment, so they wish to dual boot usually the previous OS is still in use, that is where I came from. So back to the EFI boot partition, there can be only one for the boot manager (Grub2). Also the bootloader arguments are modified after installation with rpm-ostree not grub2-mkconfig like in workstation, and most other nix’s that use Grub2.

1 Like

Thanks to your answer I went forward with the Kionite installation, which went smoothly after taking THIS advice too.

I have created 3 partitions, as said there:

  1. one/boot, ext4, 1 GiB
  2. one boot/uefi, 500-600 MB
  3. one / (root), much larger

After first update and reboot the Fedora boot list showed all the other installed operating systems.

I’ll mark your answer as the solution.