As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.
The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.
I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.
If you can find Flatpacks for most of your software, or if you don't often install new packages, silverblue is truly awesome. If you are installing an RPM tho you have to reboot to use it. If you are like me and have long-lived tmux sessions that you hate starting over with, the reboot is super annoying.
That said I may switch to Silverblue anyway at some point, because it really is amazing in many ways.
I have a laptop with an encrypted LVM drive that has a separate /home partition with very little space left for user files. I installed some Flatpaks and got a disk-space warning.
I'm not surprised, but Flatpaks install everything in the user's home directory. So if you know you're going to be using Flatpak apps, make /home bigger.
The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.
The worse part is, what feels like the daily 30 or so packages that need updates. They should really separate the critical security ones out, and batch the normal updates on a two week schedule.
I've been using silverblue as my daily driver for the past few months, installing rpm's into the 'toolbox' is the recommended way, I have a few rpms related to power management that I layer onto the ostree, but other than that everything runs in a container. It's a wonderful OS.
The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.
I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.