After about 5 years away from desktop Linux, I have now been using Bluefin/Bazzite for the past few months as a Windows/MacOS replacement on my personal desktop and laptop.
I knew that Bazzite was supposedly good for gaming but never looked into it any more than that. When I eventually learned about Bluefin, I was surprised to find that it, Bazzite, and all the other Universal Blue “distros” are built with the same container-native tech that I use every day at work. Needless to say I was immediately sold.
I have been very impressed so far. I don’t find the immutable OS limiting in my day-to-day work at all. I guess I’m all about that “defaults lifestyle” now.
Hi everyone! I built this 4 years ago as a passion project and now it's led to a culmination of things that led to release. Happy to answer questions!
I was confused by my first several readings of the projectbluefin.io site, due in part to not having prior experience with some of the techs (e.g. their 2023 announcement said "Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue by a bunch of cloud-native nerds. ... Originally Bluefin was "Fedora Silverblue for Ubuntu Expatriates". I ... wanted Silverblue but with a more Ubuntu-like desktop." I've never used Silverblue so that told me very little.
But I think I'm beginning to understand. Please correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong:
- Bluefin is, fundamentally, a container image that you run with your preferred container runtime (Docker, Podman, whatever).
- But where most containers are slimmed-down to run just one app, Bluefin is a Linux desktop in a container.
- Bluefin includes Podman in its image, so you can run other containers inside your container. (Yo dude, I hear you like containers...)
- Because Bluefin is a container image, updates are all-or-nothing, i.e. atomic. You download the updated image, then reboot into it next time you're ready to reboot.
- Installing other apps once you're running Bluefin is done via flatpak, rather than snap or apt or dnf or pacman. And there's a graphical app store that connects to Flathub. (I don't yet know what the offically-recommended way is to install software that isn't yet on Flathub).
Anything incorrect in that list? Anything major that I left out?
(Edited only to add a newline between bullet points, because I didn't realize that Hacker News doesn't implement that part of Markdown. The fact that asterisks around words gives you italics fooled me into thinking that more of Markdown than italics was implemented.)
As someone quite happy with a vanilla Fedora Silverblue install on both my desktop and laptop, can anyone explain why I would rebase to Bluefin instead? It seems like there must be technical merit to the Universal Blue spins beyond adding preinstalled software/configs, but I can't find it, despite looking.
How quickly and safely are bugs fixed in Bluefin?
It looks like Debian equivalents might be VanillaOS, EndlessOS, and (though not as similar) StarlingX, since all are OSTree-based for atomic updates.
I’m curious what others’ experience is with developing on these- do drivers work out-of-the-box and is it easy to configure, similar to macOS stability with something like brew to get latest packages and apps?
Eventually I’ll probably have to go back to free OSes because things don’t seem to be getting better.
I have tried both Silverblue and Bluefin and I realized that I want something in between. So basically Silverblue+codecs+drivers.
Maybe https://github.com/ublue-os/image-template is the way to go when I do my setup next time.
So Bluefin GDX is a good fit for the Nvidia DGX workstations going for 8-15k on ebay?
I don't even do language model stuff I just want a gold computer
Meh. I haven't seriously considered GTK ecosystems since 3 got released. Between the increased usage of screen real estate, feature minimalism as a philosophy, becoming infested with ever more JavaScript that hampers performance, the continuous API instability that strangles extension development, and "my way or the highway" approach to workflows... I just don't get why people like it.
I'm a little surprised that an LTS product is based on CentOS 10 stream. Doesn't that have the shortest support?
A backported Gnome with a recent kernel definitively needs a current MESA backport.
I love the u-blue stuff I've used so far (Bazzite and uCore) but god do I wish they had one with cosmic desktop. Fedora atomic does, and it looks like u-blue used to (there's an archived repo), but until then I'm sticking with pop-os
I absolutely love what the universalblue team has been doing. They are one of the few organizations that are truly dedicated to providing a first-class, enjoyable, batteries included linux experience on the desktop.
I truly believe that updates are seamless not just because of all the buzzwords about the underlying technology but because its made for people who actually use the system daily. They gate the fedora kernel and track breaking changes so you don't get them, and generally care about the user experience. If you want sensible gnome defaults and extensions they are there (or there to be disabled at the click of a button). If you want remote desktop streaming (sunshine/moonlight) its there. On the flip side, their distribution model also means no more need to keep track of out of tree kernel modules on upgrades (zfs, nvidia, waydroid even on Bazzite).
Now onto the post specifically: LTS from a CentOS Stream base seems interesting. Fedora is nice, and the universalblue team tames it 99%, but its edge can be a bit too bleeding sometimes. My only reticence with CentOS Stream though is that it is veering dangerously close to Red Hat proper which I am unsure how to feel about. I am eagerly awaiting when non-rpms distros will be able to use the same underlying technology Bluefin uses, and see how the space evolves. A debian base especially seems interesting in theory. There has recently been some progress on that front: https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865 https://github.com/bootcrew/debian-bootc