 I have made many different videos on immeatable distributions in the past. I've talked about what they are. I've talked about a few of the specific distributions. And overall, I've come to the conclusion in the past that they're not really for me, right? I really don't want to have the constraints that I feel immeatable distributions put on me as a Linux user. And I think part of that is that even though I understood what an immeatable distribution was, I didn't really get it, right? I didn't understand the actual benefits to using an immeatable distribution. And while I would say that I'm closer to understanding now than I was before, that may be a little bit of a fib given that I'm still learning and trying to understand exactly what these things are and what the benefits are for real usage when it comes to like normal Linux users, right? I understand the benefits of them when it comes to like enterprise and vast deployments of computers. But when it comes to actual desktop usage of regular people, I have only started to begin to understand what the benefits are for us Normies. I mean, Normies when it comes to Linux users at least. Today though, what I want to do is show you one of the benefits that I have discovered. And that is the ability to switch between different versions of an immeatable system very, very easily. So the process of doing this comes to us from a project called Ublue. And it is a very cool projects that I don't really understand all of the workings behind. I'm still kind of learning. So the technological aspect of what's actually happening here, I'm not going to be able to explain but I'm gonna be able to show you the outcome of it. And that's what we're gonna do today. So before I jump in, if you would be so kind just to leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. So today, what I'm gonna show you is I'm gonna take a stock brand new version of Silverblue which is a GNOME based immeatable distribution from Fedora. And I'm going to turn it into several different things. We're gonna take a little bit of a journey through several different desktop environments. And I'm going to do it very, very quickly. So let's go ahead and jump in. So the mechanism of doing this and you're probably still a little bit confused over exactly what we're doing comes to us from a project, as I said, called Universalblue. And that's available from a URL called ublue.it or universal-blue.org. And I'll leave links to this in the video description. Basically what this does is it allows you to take a existing version of Fedora and turn it into a different version of Fedora. And when I say version of Fedora, what I'm really talking about is Silverblue, Kenowite, things like that, things that are already immeatable can be transitioned from one version to another very, very easily. There are also options for you to build your own images if you want to do so. So if you wanted to create an image with all of your own packages, your select programs that you use for programming or development or whatever you wanted to do, you could do that. If you wanted to create one with your own window manager or your preferred window manager, I should say you could do that. Now, in the future, I would like to make a video over how to do that. I just haven't gotten around to learning it yet. So today we're gonna focus on the easier part, which is transitioning between different versions of immeatable Fedora. So first, we're on GNOME right now. As you can see, this is GNOME version 44, maybe 45. I don't actually know. I'm not a GNOME user, you guys know this. But this is Fedora 38, it is actually Silverblue 38. And I'm gonna first transition us to Kinoite, which is the KDE version of Silverblue. In order to do that, you go to the images of Ublue, which you can find from their homepage, which is this list here. And then you scroll down, you can see that they have several pre-made images for you. Now, when I first heard the term images, I thought these were gonna be ISOs, right? I thought you could download the ISO and actually install it. But they're not actually that. These are just things that you run inside of an existing version of Fedora that will rebase your version of Fedora into something different. So we're gonna scroll down here to Kinoite and we're gonna grab this one liner here. Now, there are two different versions of this. So if you're on a system that uses an AMD card or an Intel GPU, you would select this one here. If you wanted to use one that has the Nvidia drivers attached to it, you can use this one here. Because this is not a Fedora project, it's developed outside of Fedora by the community, they're able to include packages that wouldn't necessarily be able to be included with Fedora like proprietary Nvidia drivers. So if you need the Nvidia drivers inside of your image, you can get that very easily just by selecting the proper image. I don't need the Nvidia drivers. So I'm going to select this one here. I just need to copy this line here, copy. And I'm gonna open up a terminal. I'm going to paste that line. I'm gonna enter and then I'm gonna wait. It doesn't take very long. Okay, that actually took about three minutes or so, but it wasn't too long at all. So once it's done its thing, all you have to do is reboot. So I'm going to go ahead and close Firefox here. I'm gonna do a system CTL reboot if I can spell, which everybody knows that I cannot. And that's going to reboot. And then when we come back, if everything worked properly, we'll no longer be in GNOME, we'll actually be in KDE. Now if you've used Linux for any amount of time, you know that you can theoretically move from GNOME to KDE on any distribution. That's possible, but it's always a mess because there are a ton of packages and dependencies and stuff that you have to remove from one, you know, install with the other. And it can get very messy and it doesn't always work out the way you expect it to. This was one line, it did its thing. And as you can see, this is SDDM. I'm gonna enter my password here. And when it boots into KDE, you'll see that it is actually KDE. Now, there are some questions that you probably have. The first one, and this is the one that I had, was what happens to my personal files, right? If I have things in the home directory, do those things get erased when I all of a sudden switch to a brand new system, which is what this feels like you're doing? The answer is no, all of your personal files stay there. And that's kind of the beauty of an immutable system. You're only changing the underlying layers. All of your user layers stay exactly where they were, they're never touched. So that's the cool part about an immutable system. We just switched from GNOME to KDE in the matter of like three or four minutes without literally any effort on my part. I didn't have to uninstall any of GNOME. I didn't have to install KDE. It all just rebased to this. So now that we've moved from GNOME to KDE, I wanna try a second image and see if that will work. So I'm gonna copy this link here. We're gonna try LXCute. I haven't used LXCute in literal years. So I'm gonna copy that. I wanna make sure I'm using the right version. I'm gonna go to here and open up a terminal. I'm gonna copy that one line there and hit Enter. In about three minutes from now, this should be done. So that one actually installed a little bit quicker. So I should be able to close all the stuff here and do a reboot and see if we actually enter into LXCute. And here we are inside of a very interesting desktop environment that I haven't tried. Actually, I'm not actually sure if I've ever tried LXCute now that I think about it. I think the last time I tried LX anything, it was LXDE, which is before LXCute was a thing. So I have no clue what this actually is. It would be fun to explore. But as you can see, we've actually moved from GNOME to KDE to LXCute, all with two lines of terminal commands. That's it. It took overall approximately seven minutes to do, though there was some editing magic that are between actual takes because I mess things up as I usually do. But as you can see, it was very, very easy to do. And we're just there. And even if I have no clue what I'm doing here inside of LXCute, where the hell is the menu? That just gives you to the terminal. I don't know where the rest of the things is. I don't know how to use this desktop environment. So sue me. Anyway, but you can see that that's very, very easy to do. And if you were to do a reboot here, so if I do system, CTL, actually I'm gonna go ahead and shut down so they can see grub. Okay, so here we are on the grub of the virtual machine that I've been using. So as you can see, there are different entries here that are available to us. So this top one here is the last one that we used, which was LXCute. The one before that was Kino White. And then below that should be GNOME. I'm not actually sure if that's the GNOME one. We're gonna actually boot into it and find out. So basically what you can do is once you've rebased to something, you can go back. So that's actually LXCute. I'm not sure where the GNOME one is. So this is just LXCute again. So, but theoretically at least you should be able to go back to different versions that you've based on before. So we can if we can get grub to actually step for longer than a few seconds, I'm gonna go ahead and reboot here. So I can can select the Kino White one and that will take us from LXCute back to KDE. And we'll see if that works. It should and it does. See, here we are right back into KDE. Like I said, theoretically you should be able to do the GNOME one as well. I'm not sure why that wasn't an option there. It should be there. But as you can see, that's awesome, right? And the fact that there are so many different images that you can do this with. So I'm gonna actually show you all those images again. There are probably two dozen different images here for you to select from. Now a lot of them are just variations on a theme. So a lot of them are just basically silver blue but with different options. So like this Bazzite one, I'm not sure how you pronounce that. That's going to be a GNOME but with gaming stuff, right? There are four different ones of those. There's one here that's basically a clone of GNOME OS and it appears that there are more than there are simply because there's usually at least two for each one because a lot of them have NVIDIA versions. And then there's one here for development work, one here that's based on, one that's basically silver blue and it's kind of for people who have left Ubuntu. There is a Budgie one. There's one for Cinnamon. There's one for Deepin. There's one for Kino White, which we tried. There's Alex Cute, which we tried. There's Mate. There's Sarah Sia, if that's how you pronounce it. That's actually Sway Windo Manager, if I'm correct. There's, you can actually rebase right back to silver blue if you wanted to. So as you can see, there are a lot of different images that you can choose from. And as you've seen, it's really easy to move back and forth between them. Now, I don't know how well it would work as you stack more and more layers on top of each other. So it's possible that you'd have to remove some of those layers over time to kind of get things to work. I'm not sure about that yet. I haven't tested that out yet, but being able to move from one desktop environment to another, especially ones that aren't necessarily related in terms of technology. So we've installed, we had GNOME, which is a GTK-based DE to KDE, which is a QT-based DE, which, and then we went to Alex Cute, which is also QT, right? So we could then go back to GNOME if we wanted to, just as easily. All we'd have to do is select the silver blue one here and go back to GNOME, which I'm actually going to try here real quick just to see if I can actually do it. Now, like I said, theoretically, the GNOME one should still be on the system. I'm not sure why that's not there, but we're going to go ahead and give this a try. Worst that could happen is I would just have to boot back into KDE. Okay, so that's done. Let's go ahead and see if we can reboot and see if we're right back into GNOME. Ha ha, look at that. It actually worked. And is it gonna, yep, there we go. And it even remembered my wallpaper and everything. Now it still has my extensions exactly the way it was. So that's pretty cool, right? That has to be the neatest feature of an immutable that I can think of right now. Now, I know there are many other ones like built-in containerization support from like Toolbox or Distrobox or whatever. I know like VanillaOS has the ability to install packages from every single distribution or something like that. Those all sound really cool, but this here for someone who switches between things a lot is a very promising thing to think of. Now, for me personally, I would like there to be more window managers. Now, like I said at the beginning, there is a way to make your own image. And I'm going to learn how to do that so that I can make a video on how to do it. I haven't got there yet. It's not supposedly all that complicated, but we'll see how it goes. I tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. So like I said, we'll see how it goes. So that is Ublue and that is switching between different versions of immutable Fedora very, very quickly, very, very easily. And I think it's really, really neat. So if you have thoughts on this, you can leave those in the comment section below. If you haven't already, would you please leave a thumbs up on this video? I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Links for YouTube and PayPal will be in the video description as well. If you'd like to support me there. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. Again, thank you. Thanks to everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.