Need some clarity on atomic blue distros?

[dil@is.hardlywork.ing]

How does rebasing work? If Universal Blue were to shutdown and Bazzite/Bluefin/Aurora were to suddenly stop development and updates, could I rebase to any other atomic distro without losing my files/apps and continue to get updates there? Using the same DE (since I heard there are some issues, fixable, but annoying)
Or is it just a way to swap to a new distro while still being able to swap back to a backup of your old one if you need to?

(It doesn't matter if them shutting down is illogical, being able to move provides a sense of security.)

[telorand@reddthat.com]

You could absolutely rebase to Silverblue or Kinoite. Rebasing swaps out the core system files (basically, all the immutable stuff) and leaves /etc and /var untouched. So your home directory and other configs won't change.

However, Universal Blue is not likely to shut down, since there's many maintainers, and they have directions on how to create your own downstream distro, if you want. On top of that, BlueBuild has their own set of tools to roll your own distro downstream from the base Fedora Atomics.

So no matter what, the likelihood that you'll be stranded is almost zero.

[braintrain@lemmy.ml]

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Updates_Rollbacks_and_Rebasing/rebase_guide/

This should answer most, if not all of your questions.

It's important to remember, that you should rebase to the same DE to avoid issues. Although there shouldn't be any data loss when rebasing, a backup of your files is recommended.

[dil@is.hardlywork.ing]

Thats prettt much all of what I needed to know, I see why they're reccomended.

[jlow@beehaw.org]

Yeah, it works amazingly well, too. I've been rebasing between Bazzite and Kinoite a number of times in the last months (because Bazzite had some problems recognizing my drawing tablet which has been fixed now) without issue.

[guenther_amanita@slrpnk.net]

I'm constantly switching between Gnome and KDE (Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, Kinoite, Silverblue, whatever) and I never had any issues.
The only thing that gets messed up a bit is theming, where I have to change the GTK theme, and sometimes the window buttons when I go from KDE to Gnome, which is also reverted in just one click in Gnome tweaks.