As of 2020, the Atomic Workstation is dormant and has been for some time. The content of this page and others related to Atomic are preserved for historical reference and because some of the content is still useful and relevant, but the group is not active or holding meetings. Fedora Silverblue is the replacement for Atomic Workstation.
Atomic Workstation
The idea of an "Atomic Workstation" is to use the ideas of "Project Atomic" to have a core operating system for a desktop/workstation that updates atomically as a whole. Desktop applications are Flatpaks. Local server application development happens primarily in oc cluster up. We also encourage use of "pet" containers via Docker or related tools.
Current status
See this post for links to an installer ISO.
Advantages
The use of rpm-ostree for the core OS brings fully atomic upgrades. Because rpm-ostree is a hybrid image/package system, it's also possible to layer RPMs for desktop applications which aren't yet Flatpaks, and "OS extensions" such as powerline and ykclient.
Moving desktop applications into Flatpak brings stronger isolation, and solves very longstanding issues with using yum/dnf for desktop applications, such as the fact that upgrading deletes the files underneath the running application and often breaks it. (And we don't want most desktop applications in the base ostree stream, since it's more for the "base OS" which goes along with a kernel which requires a reboot).
One important note: We are focusing here on Flatpak for isolation - we expect to auto-convert packaged RPMs in Fedora into Flatpak, rather than relying primarily on the "3rd party repository" model.
oc cluster up allows developers to test server applications locally with ease, and then push them to production Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters.
Many developers want random utilities which aren't server apps or desktop apps, such as ansible for example. We encourage running "pet" containers for these where one uses tools like dnf or pip. We should have a specialized desktop terminal application that makes it easy to create/manage these "pet" containers - similar to virt-manager.
Use cases
Pretty much anything that the normal Workstation is used for. The primary target of the Workstation is different varieties of developer, but the Workstation is also supposed to work for other users such as sysadmins, people who want to play games, or people who only want to use productivity applications.
Work Items
Basics
- An ostree repo/branch for Fedora Workstation, constructed using rpm-ostree; this should be an regular output of the Fedora releng infrastructure
- GNOME Software support for rpm-ostree upgrades
- This will basically replace the "System updates" line in the updates list. Need to figure out where to get metadata
- Better support for using Docker/OCI containers as "pet shells"
- Automatically convert RPM packages into flatpak