Going from Fedora to Rocky on my personal laptop. If this ends up being not too painful, I'll probably go with RHEL for my work laptop in a while.
What with using Flatpak for all my desktop applications, having a base OS with a slower release cycle seems quite viable.
@bkhl Have you stopped using Silverblue then?
@returntrip no, I still have it on my work laptop, but in my new work role I work with non-Podman container stuff most of the time.
Things are still possible to work around, but it is starting to feel a bit pointless to use it when I have to layer external repos, and hundreds of packages (when dependencies are counted).
@returntrip what I used to do with janky customer VPNs was to run the client in a VM (Windows if that was easier), then route through it.
@bkhl I tried that, but for some reason my system (16GB RAM) was struggling to handle the VM NAD its standard workload (I think I have way too many browser tabs open)
@returntrip the main question for me is if the "old" #Emacs will be a problem for me. Emacs in Flatpak was pretty quirky when I tried it, and even if it would work great it would be inconvenient as my workflows now depend on Emacs launching containers a lot (e.g. to run LSP servers and tests).
Fedora Workstation is an option of course, but feels silly for _one_ program (even if it is Emacs).
@bkhl can you maybe use toolbox in Cantos Stream and install emacs there?
@returntrip maybe, though that still needs hacks to run container tools on the host, that are practically the same as with Flatpak.
@bkhl I missed the original post, so I'm guessing at the original issue. But what about (a) just building Emacs from source? or (b) using Nix's/Guix's Emacs on top of whatever distro you're using?
@emacsomancer @returntrip yup, if that's the only application that's an issue with using a longer term release distro I might just compile my own Emacs.
@bkhl I compile my own anyway since I'm using Emacs 28.0.5. It's not a major burden.
@returntrip
@emacsomancer @returntrip yeah, wouldn't think so. I guess I will do it the minute I find something lacking in Emacs 26, which is what RHEL is currently on. It's not _that_ old, so maybe I won't even notice the difference ...
@bkhl depends mainly on what packages you use probably. there could be something targeting 27. but 26 is only a couple of years old.
@emacsomancer @returntrip the main thing is the JSON parsing performance improvements, since I use LSP a lot. I guess I'll find out soon if it's fast enough anyway.
@bkhl
Managing the compilation/installation of a few programs you particularly care about is entirely reasonable. You can also keep multiple installations around if you want to check on old vs new behavior.
You could also look if someone has already set up a copr for new Emacs (or generally new XYZ) on CentOS 8. I know there were some for Emacs on CentOS 7.
@emacsomancer @returntrip
@tfb @emacsomancer @returntrip sure, it's just that when I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Silverblue I dropped a rather large set of Ansible playbooks to set up a lot of development stuff in my home directory. I'm quite wary of getting back into the same situation.
That said a year of living in Silverblue and doing almost all development stuff with containers has maybe immunized me against that somewhat.
@bkhl Do look into copr if you haven't though. You can use Fedora's build farm to make packages for CentOS @emacsomancer @returntrip
@returntrip tried Rocky for a week and then Centos Stream for a weekend. It was too painful to go back to that old Gnome version particularly, and not having rpm-ostree now feels so dangerous now that I'm used to it.
@returntrip one of the first things I did on Rocky was to run 'sudo dnf -y remove evolution"*"', which removed the whole desktop environment (because it still wants evolution-server).
Because I've basically only been running dnf in toolbox or other containers for more than a year, the -y has become muscle memory.
So it's back to Silverblue and I'll just live with all the overlaying when I need Docker etc. for work
@bkhl thanks for the feedback! That is a great reminder how powerful and useful rpmostree is...
@bkhl understandable.... for the machine I use at work there is one thing in I have not been able to fix and that nags me: Cisco Anyconnect VPN client cannot be layered/installed...sometimes I also think about switching to standard Fedora for work...