Earlier this year, I wrote an editorial recommending that people try out Fedora Silverblue 40 instead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS due to the paradigm shift in operating system architecture in Silverblue. One of the big benefits of atomic updates, which Silverblue uses, is the ease of upgrading the system.
With the recent release of Fedora Silverblue 41 Beta, you may be wondering if it's possible to do an in-place upgrade, and the answer is yes, here's how.
The very first thing to do is to check for updates, you can do this through Software or use the following command in the Terminal:
rpm-ostree upgrade
After you have installed any updates, you'll now need to reboot before proceeding with the rest of the commands.
Once your system is rebooted, you'll need to do the rest of the upgrade process in the Terminal, so open that and type in:
ostree remote refs fedora
You should see the following line in the output:
fedora:fedora/41/x86_64/silverblue
To back up your current version, you can pin it to the GRUB with the following command:
sudo ostree admin pin 0
To remove the pinned deployment use following command (2 corresponds to the entry position in the output from rpm-ostree status):
sudo ostree admin pin --unpin 2
Next, you just need one last command to rebase your system to the Fedora 41 branch, here it is:
rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/41/x86_64/silverblue
Once done, you can reboot your system and start using Fedora Silverblue 41 Beta. If anything goes wrong, you can pick the pinned entry from the GRUB menu (press ESC during the boot sequence to access the GRUB menu), your system will then boot into that saved state and in the Terminal you can type the following command to rollback permanently:
rpm-ostree rollback
Let us know in the comments if you found this guide useful. Have you already tried out the Fedora 41 Beta? How are you finding it?
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