All in all, Fedora Silverblue is easy to use. Some things are however still more complex in Silverblue, so this post tries to give some useful hints.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code can be installed from Flathub as usual. However, getting the Dev Container support working requires some more work. As of January 2025, this seems to be the most up-to-date tutorial. To summarize:

  • Install VS Code from Flathub.
  • Allow access to /tmp, needed to build containers:
    flatpak override --user --filesystem=/tmp com.visualstudio.code
  • Create the ~/.local/bin/podman-host wrapper.
  • In the VS Code Settings, set Docker Path to that wrapper.

Here’s an advanced example with USB and GPU pass-through and X11 support.

If VS Code opens the folder in the container, but you don’t see any files, and if ls in the terminal responds with “Permission denied”, this is likely a SELinux issue. Here’s a long-standing issue report with some workarounds. For temporal testing, you can see if everything works with SELinux disabled: sudo setenforce 0. If it does, adding this to your devcontainer.json might work as a less intrusive workaround:

"runArgs": [
  "--userns=keep-id",
  "--security-opt=label=disable"
],

Saleae Logic

As on any linux system, you’ll first have to install the udev rules. Add the following to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-SaleaeLogic.rules:

#
# Saleae Logic
# This file should be installed to /etc/udev/rules.d so that you can access the Saleae Logic hardware without being root
#
# Type this at the command prompt: sudo cp 99-SaleaeLogic.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
#

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="0925", ATTR{idProduct}=="3881", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1001", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1003", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1004", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1005", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1006", MODE="0666"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="21a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1007", MODE="0666"

In addition, the Saleae Logic 2 software uses some libraries that are not installed by default on Silverblue. If you run the AppImage file directly, you will therefore just get a Error Connecting to Socket message.

To solve this, you need to install the libnsl and libxcrypt-compat packages. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the Saleae software to work in a distrobox container, so for now it seems the packages need to be layered:

sudo rpm-ostree install --apply-live libnsl libxcrypt-compat

Let’s hope Saleae builds a Flatpak bundle for Flathub at some point, to make installation of the software much easier.