I can only speak for Silverblue, as I didn’t try other ones yet. But I’m extremely happy with it.
General
- I don’t get the difference between rpm-ostree and other techniques, like those from VanillaOS or Aeon, yet. So I can’t tell if ostree is the “best” one
- BIGGEST pro (in my opinion): the rebase-function (see the following)
- Working with it feels very “clean”, as your base-OS doesn’t get crammed with trash programs
- You containerize pretty much everything if you can. Flatpak and Distrobox are your friend.
- Should be more reliable, since there’s “your” stuff and “the OS’ stuff”, and every system is the same -> devs can fix bugs better
“Official” (vanilla) Silverblue
- The oldest one around. Big developer- and userbase
- Very robust and stable
- But also minimalist (no additional packages preinstalled)
- Comes only with Gnome or KDE
- You need to layer/ install essential packages yourself, which somehow isn’t the recommended way to install stuff. I yet still have to find out what disadvantages this has.
Universal-Blue (uBlue)
- Isn’t a distro/ fork of SB, but takes advantage of the rebase feature. Basically, you can choose from where your distro draws it’s OS-base. So, it’s just a repository for OS-images.
- Comes with essential packages and tweaks OOTB (distrobox, 3rd party stuff, Nvidia drivers, etc.), which aren’t layered, but part of the image
- Everyone can publish their image. There’s the “normal” SB with QOL-stuff added, there are some DE-spins (e.g. XFCE), some are similar to SteamOS, and so on.
- CON: I don’t know how reliable and “bloated” they are compared to Vanilla SB.
This is just my not-at-all-in-depth summary based on playing around with a few in VMs, but as a non-power-user:
Fedora Silverblue
Pros: Good support/documentation
Cons: barebones Gnome/required layering quite a few packagesif you want any kind of customizationbefore I could get my system up and runningOpenSUSE Aeon (MicroOS)
Pros: good number of built-in tools (e.g. Tweaks, distrobox)
Cons: documentation is sorely lackingVanilla OS
Pros: great ease of use/installation, container-centric
Cons: still very much a work in progress/small dev teamIt’s also worth mentioning Universal Blue which is based on Fedora Silverblue but has multiple variants with additional doftware. It seems like you can rebase an existing Silverblue system to it and also switch back without reinstallation.