My college-bound child has a frame.work laptop DIY edition coming soon. We're preparing now by installing Fedora Silverblue on the SSD we already have. I put the SSD into a USB NVMe housing, attached it to their existing Fedora system, then guided them through setting up a virtual machine and installing Silverblue inside the virtual machine.
Sadly, libvirt-manager doesn't support directly attaching a device to a VM. So we added a dummy qcow file in VM setup, chose to configure before booting, deleted the dummy device and its associated qcow file, and then booted. Waited at the boot prompt, ran virsh attach-disk silverblue38 /dev/sdb vda in a root terminal, and then let it boot into the installer.
In the installer, it was just like installing on bare metal, except that we didn't have to set up WiFi, since it was using the host system's networking.
When the new laptop arrives, we'll stop the VM, mount /var/home (because Silverblue) on the host system, copy the /home content from the host system to the new drive, and when we drop the SSD into the frame.work laptop, it should just boot up into a working system.
