Switching to uBlue and back again: There are a few rough spots.

[garrett]

I completely ignored this very sensible notice:

Warning This is an experimental feature and should not be used in production, try it in a VM for a while, you have been warned!

...And rebased my computer.

The things I've noticed: It'll happily ­— by default — remove your Flatpaks and install its own. (This is a certainly a feature for clean systems, but the fact that it's not skippable is a bug, especially for people rebasing to check it out.)

Also: Switching back to stock Silverblue still had a lot of Ubuntu-ish defaults in dconf.

I fixed this by running:

sudo rm -f /etc/dconf/db/local
sudo dconf update

So, I'd suggest two things:

1. Provide a way to skip the Flatpak purging and installing.

2. Make a path to rebase back to Silverblue (or Kinoite, etc.). Ideally, it'd be automated (somehow... not sure how that would even work) or have it documented somewhere on how to undo things. (The above worked for me. I don't think anything else is necessary.)

[garrett]

This did give me an opportunity to make sure backups were up to date and gave me the slight push to redo my local configs, so no harm done or anything. 😉 And I'm used to jumping into alpha stuff to try to help out others.

Aside from the Flatpak purging (which just requires reinstalling the apps I previously had — configs and data importantly persisted) and figuring out the Ubuntu UI tweaks (fonts, window buttons, etc.), it was pretty smooth switching back and was quite neat to see how easy it is to switch to custom builds like this.

[castrojo]

Yeah I am not happy with how we're swapping all that out.

I haven't found a clean way to declare flatpak remotes and apps without doing it during the next reboot. Ideally I just want to stick a list of apps and remotes somewhere and a thing figures it out.

I love VanillaOS's first boot system: https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/first-setup

Perhaps we could modify and ship that and just have them as buttons so if you're coming from a rebase you can just cancel out but if it's a new install you can click your way through.