Updates, Upgrades & Rollbacks

OS updates currently have to be managed via the command line. To do this, run:

This will check for new updates and download and install them if they are available. Alternatively, to check for available updates without downloading them, run:

Upgrading between major versions (such as from Fedora 39 to Fedora 40) can be done using the rpm-ostree command.

First, make sure that you are running the latest update for the current version:

Reboot your system if needed. Then, verify that the branch for the next major version is available. You can print all available branches for Fedora Sway Atomic with this command:

After you’ve verified the name of your branch, you are ready to proceed. For example, to upgrade to Fedora Sway Atomic 40, the command is:

The process is very similar to a system update: the new OS is downloaded and installed in the background, and you just boot into it when it is ready.

Additionally, you can choose to rebase to a different immutable variant of Fedora, like for example Fedora Silverblue. Fedora Silverblue is similar to Fedora Sway Atomic, except for the fact that it uses the GNOME desktop environment instead of the default Sway Wayland compositor.

What this means is, you can rebase to Fedora Silverblue to try it out, without ever touching your current system. Because the two system images are isolated from eachother, the two desktop environments will never be installed at the same time. All of your flatpak apps and /home files will stay persistent between rebases. Same applies for testing out the bleeding-edge version of Fedora Sway Atomic, which is Rawhide.

If you decide to rebase, make sure to pin your current deployment, so you don’t accidentaly lose it (by default, only the two most recent deployments are kept).

Fedora Sway Atomic keeps a record of the previous OS version, which can be switched to instead of the latest version. While this shouldn’t usually be necessary, it can be helpful if there is a problem with an update or an upgrade (rollbacks work the same way for both), as well as for development purposes.

There are two ways to roll back to the previous version:

After rolling back, you will technically be on an old OS version, and may be prompted to update. Updating will undo the rollback, so should be avoided if you want the rollback to stay in effect.

rpm-ostree only keeps one rollback version available by default. If you want to rollback to another version that the one currently available on your system, you can do so with the following commands:

Note that this will deploy the exact version as requested and will not include overlayed packages and other changes.