In 2018 I recorded a video about Fedora Silverblue 29… but I never released it. I was completely lost.
The first Silverblue video I actually published was on Fedora 30 in April 2019. A comment on the Fedora 31 video later helped a little: “This looks like a version control system for the distro.” Partially true — but atomic is more than that. It’s a separation of the filesystems: the parts that can be read-only and the parts that need read/write.
It took until Silverblue 34 before I trusted it as a daily driver. Later I tried Kinoite, bounced back because of hardware, fought with a hot Intel laptop and an AtomMan X7 Ti, and finally landed on proper AMD hardware in 2025. In April 2026 I installed Bluefin while keeping Kinoite on the second NVMe.
This is the full story — the wins, the hardware failures, the dual-drive experiment, and why I haven’t switched back to Kinoite since mid-June 2026.
We also cover:
• Official Atomic (Silverblue/Kinoite) vs curated Universal Blue (Bluefin/Aurora)
• Toolbox vs Distrobox
• Update cadence differences
• How clean I keep the rpm-ostree base
• Why Universal Blue recommends clean installs when switching between GNOME and KDE images
Chapters below.
If you’re deciding between pure Fedora Atomic and Bluefin/Aurora, this should help.
Links:
• Project Bluefin: https://projectbluefin.io
• Aurora: https://getaurora.dev
• Universal Blue: https://universal-blue.org
• Fedora Atomic Desktops: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Chapters below.
00:00 - Intro
01:37 - Fedora 30
01:58 - Fedora 30
02:44 - SilverBlue34
04:29 - Kinoite 35
07:41 - GMKtec EVO-X1 and Kinoite 44
08:53 - Bazzite
12:39 - How do i use this??
14:32 - Final Thoughts