Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to Fedora 31 on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert back if anything unforeseen happens.

Prior the the update to Fedora 31 it is better to do any pending upgrades.

Updating using GNOME Software

Unfortunately the update can’t be done in GNOME Software right now, because of a bug in GNOME Software itself. For additional information please look at upstream issue.

Updating using terminal

If you do not like GNOME Software or like to do everything in terminal, than this next guide is for you.

Updating to Fedora 31 using terminal is easy. First, check if the 31 branch is available, which should be true now:

$ ostree remote refs fedora

You should see the following in the output:

fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue

Next, rebase your system to the Fedora 31 branch.

$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue

Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora 31.

How to revert things back

If anything bad happens — for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora 31 at all — it’s easy to go back. Just pick the previous entry in GRUB, and your system will start in its previous state before switching to Fedora 31. To make this change permanent, use the following command:

$ rpm-ostree rollback

That’s it. Now you know how to rebase to Fedora 31 and back. So why not do it today?