Experiment: Martin Pitt's desktop OSTree from Fedora OCI container

I have maintained a custom minimal Sway OSTree repo for quite some time in my ostree-pitti-workstation project . This works well, but is relatively complex to maintain.

So instead of building the tree from scratch, this project is an experiment for building it from a Fedora CoreOS base image. CoreOS is not a very good fit for hardware installation, as it does not ship enough drivers, but a lot of stuff that does not belong onto a laptop, such as Ignition, zincati, or the coreos-installer. But there is work underway to provide more minimal base images or Fedora IoT, which would make this a lot nicer.

Installation

You need to run an existing OSTree based system like Fedora CoreOS or Fedora Silverblue. Switch to this tree with:

sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/martinpitt/pitti-workstation-oci:latest

After that, you can install weekly updates with

sudo rpm-ostree upgrade

If anything goes wrong, you can go back to the previous version with sudo rpm-ostree rollback.

Login

There is no graphical login manager. I log in on VT1, and my .bashrc automatically starts the GNOME SSH agent and sway:

if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then
    export `gnome-keyring-daemon --start --components=ssh`
    export BROWSER=firefox-wayland
    export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway
    exec sway > $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/sway.log 2>&1
fi

Caveats

There is an 1.5 minute delay during boot as the initrd waits for some non-existing dev-disk-by\x2dlabel-root.device in the initrd. The OS removes all the ignition/coreos-installer bits, but dracut does not get updated properly for that. The workaround is to rename your root partition from "fedora" to "root".
The man command is missing