Installing 1Password on Fedora Silverblue with rpm-ostree
In this article, I want to briefly explain why you should consider installing 1Password on Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite as an overlay rather than using Flatpak, Toolbox, or Nix, and how to do that.
The Advantages of Installing 1Password as an Overlay
There are four ways of installing 1Password on Silverblue and I tried all of them.
- using the
unofficialnow-official Flatpak - using Toolbox
- using Nix
- using
rpm-ostree
Out of those four, I recommend using either the Flatpak or rpm-ostree.
Use the Flatpak, if you are okay with
- unlocking your browser extension separately
- typing in your password every time, rather than using your system authentication or fingerprint reader
- not using the SSH agent.
If you want to use any of those features, you should instead install it using the RPM package.
Installing 1Password using rpm-ostree
Run
cat << EOF | sudo tee -a /etc/yum.repos.d/1password.repo
[1password]
name=1Password Stable Channel
baseurl=https://downloads.1password.com/linux/rpm/stable/\$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://downloads.1password.com/linux/keys/1password.asc
EOF
Then install it using
rpm-ostree install 1password 1password-cli
Now reboot and enjoy all the features :)
Why not to use Toolbox or Nix
Using Toolbox (or Distrobox, for better integration) means you have to install a normal Fedora Workstation on your shiny, immutable Fedora and keep this container up-to-date. Otherwise, your 1Password client will be out of date too. I don’t use these containers for anything else. I forget about them and then realize, much later, that my 1Password installation is completely out-dated.
Because I use Nix (or rather home-manager) for all my CLI apps and VS Code, I also tried installing 1Password with it. However, it basically has the same restrictions as the Flatpak, at least on a non-NixOS system. Apparently the Polkit integration of the GUI does work when installing it as a module on NixOS, but it doesn’t on Fedora.