Miscellaneous Linux Fixes for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite

Ongoing, Last Updated on December 13th, 2023

This post exists solely as a place for me to share things which I’ve figured out about how to fix and improve various things in Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue. It’s not organized, it’s just meant to be indexed, and, ideally, helpful.

Fedora 39 shows a blank space with Tiling Window Managers in X11

There is a hidden window, newly introduced in Fedora 39 which is created automatically thanks to the implementation of xwaylandvideobridge. There’s not a straightforward way to find or block it, but luckily, it’s very easy to cure. I’ve just added:

killall xwaylandvideobridge &> /dev/null

To my .zshrc file, which means that any time I open a terminal, it kills this process, and the floating ‘missing’ window goes away. There may be some issues caused by this, but it’s better than sacrificing half my window space. They need to fix how this fake window works, but for now, this makes it a non-issue.

EDIT: As of the Dec. 15th Update, this appears to be fixed in Fedora 39

Distrobox fails with ‘does not match our libpod directory’

This is an ongoing Podman bug which crops up in Fedora 39 Silverblue/Kinoite, where starting a Distrobox yields…

# Error: database libpod root directory (staticdir) does not match our libpod root directory (staticdir)

This is discussed in this thread, where the below fix was suggested. Add the below, with your username changed, to ~/.config/containers/containers.conf:

[engine]
static_dir = "/home/wstyler/.local/share/containers/storage/libpod"
volume_path = "/home/wstyler/.local/share/containers/storage/libpod"

Then it works!