This spring (2026) we are rolling bluefin:gts and bluefin:latest into bluefin:stable for one "Bluefin". No action will be required on your part, this will happen automatically.
We're doing this for a few reasons:
The value GTS provided is "older software works better". What it really means is "no one messed with this", changes still made in Bluefin affect this branch immediately.
bluefin:latest - this one is an antipattern, you want to be able to pin something, and people make assumptions of what it means. We'll transparently move you to bluefin:stable too.
If you're new here there's no need to panic, bluefin:gts and bluefin:stable always share the same version twice a year for a few weeks. We're in that period now, they're both at Fedora 42.
Where is F43 in bluefin:stable?
The promotion of bluefin:stable is delayed until next week due to waiting for the ZFS module to catch up to Linux 6.17. This typically doesn't happen but we're monitoring the situation and will make the release next week or the week after, depending on the completion of the work.
In the meantime let's pretend it's out so that we can continue to Bluefin's new model. The workflow looks like this currently:
At first this looks like a rename, so let's go over the changes:
bluefin:next - all changes will land here first. We make no stability guarantees. It will build daily. This will not replace bluefin:latest because we will for sure break things in here. This will build at least daily and every time a change lands
bluefin:testing - When changes in :next have been tested by at least one person they queue up to land in testing. We anticipate things to sit in here for a week or two at a minimum unless we need to fix a regression. This builds daily.
bluefin:stable - This is effectively the current version of Fedora, except all changes going into this will have at least be vetted by the previous branches.
We do NOT have this promotion process today. This is the goal. If you are on bluefin:latest we will point you to bluefin:stable-daily so that you are still getting daily builds. We purposely are not moving you to next because that will be volatile. Both the next and testing branches will be opt in.
Testing workflow allows for super fast iteration and two stages of testing before hitting end users. This is the #1 reason to do all of this
We no longer have to keep GTS bits around the rest of the org to support it, freeing up builder space and resources
Better alignmed with Fedora CoreOS development
This does mean that we will no longer be shipping the stock Fedora kernel in any branch. We're fine with this since we prefer to keep all our users on a gated kernel.
A new report from the CNCF and SlashData reveals a major industry milestone: there are now 15.6 million cloud-native developers globally.
This Q3 2025 "State of Cloud Native Development" study shows this group now makes up nearly a third (32%) of all developers worldwide. This explosive growth is driven by the mainstream adoption of projects like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and others. The project we depend on the most, bootc, is a CNCF Sandbox project.
This represents remarkable growth from the Q1 2025 survey, which reported 9.2 million cloud-native developers—a 70% increase in just seven months.
Why this is important to Bluefin
This huge number of developers is why we chose bootc, and it's reassuring to know that our development model is continuing to grow so quickly. The explosive growth from 9.2 million developers in April to 15.6 million in November demonstrates the rapid mainstream adoption of cloud-native technologies.
renner0e has been cooking on some lightweight bling. The fastfetch output on Bluefin (and Aurora) will now include the weekly checkins of Bluefin systems, as well as weekly installs of Bazaar. This gives us insight to the ballpark number of Bluefin systems and people diving into the pure Flathub experience.
Murder Chickens: Weekly count of Bluefin users.
Bazaar Installs: Weekly count of package installations from Bazaar.
Guardians, today Bluefin GTS switched its base from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. The gathering of raptors has begun. In a two weeks Bluefin (aka bluefin:stable) releases on Fedora 43 and we will start the cycle all over again!
Looking for Fedora 43? That's here too in bluefin:latest, and will roll out to bluefin:stable users in 2 weeks. It's tough to write two of these, so we'll likely just move to spring/autumn announcements and whenever major things land. When bluefin:stable upgrades I will post it as an addenum in the discussion thread for this post.
As it ends up F43 will be coming to bluefin:stable while we're in Atlanta, GA, for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, come say hello! As a bootc reference architecture we tend to align with the release cadence of other projects. This usually means that I'm on the road when there's a Bluefin release happening, so we do status reports like this depending on where we are in the world at the time, and to ensure transparency. It's also our chance to gather with attendees and get feedback on how we can make Bluefin better and gather feedback.
You'll receive this update during your next update window, or you can run an update manually by clicking on this icon:
If you've never experienced a Bluefin upgrade before, McPhail has a full writeup. Here's the major release information:
Bluefin is an operating system for your computer. It is designed to be installed on a device upgrade for the life of the hardware – we accomplish this by sharing the maintenance and care of our systems together as a community. It is designed to be as “zero touch” as possible by providing a curated GNOME experience.
Bluefin GTS (aka bluefin:gts) is our standard release, designed to be one cycle behind the most current Fedora release. This one's been in the oven for about six months and is ready to go. In a few weeks the bluefin:stable branch will move on to Fedora 43. If you're brand new you can use the website to pick the right image or select from the grid below:
This unidentified Dromeasaur is by Dr. Natalia Jagielska, a world renowned expert paleontologist and paleoartist! We reached out to work with her on bringing her artwork and style to Bluefin, and she said yes! This rendition will be revealed in November, or you can just manually pick it in the wallpaper chooser.
I am so stoked about this, an actual scientist! We're retconning that this is just Bluefin enjoying a nice day at the lake. We have two more wallpapers from her coming soon. I have come to really appreciate the world of flying reptiles. They are terrifying.
Natalia's artwork was vectorized and remastered by Delphic Melody, please consider donating so that the collaboration can continue!
Bazaar makes its debut in Bluefin GTS! All Bluefins are now just using the Bazaar flatpak. You're in for a treat:
It's been super awesome seeing Bazaar move from a random project we found on r/gnome to what is effectively now the premier app store experience for FlatHub and Linux. You can help out tremendously by sponsoring the author.
This is also a major milestone for Bluefin since we've effectively done our part for the GNOME and FlatHub ecosystems and can now consider application installation a solved problem, we can introduce new things into Bluefin as a flatpak to begin with and move us away from distribution specific formats.
I am finding more applications now than I ever have. It's also a milestone for all Linuxes since flatpak's upcoming release gives us the flexibility to do this in a proper way with full lifecycle management. We can now be more flexible with the applications we can ship mid-cycle by plopping a file in /etc/preinstall.d. Those of you making custom images will really take advantage of this!
Shoutout to Sebastian Wick for this work in Flatpak and working on the next release of this cool tech!
What makes us different?
We're committed to a future where authors deliver their applications how they see fit. This should be decoupled from the operating system.
Speaking of packages, we've been doing more work engaging with Homebrew developers, check out this interview I did with Workbrew talking about our hopes and dreams:
Let us know if you're interested in working on Homebrew for Linux, we have opened a homebrew tap so that we can interate on bringing cool new things to you. A huge shoutout goes to Yulian Kuncheff and Ahmed Adan for spearheading this effort, please consider donating!
The fonts have been a disaster for a long time, we're finally ripping the bandaid off and removing a bunch of fonts from the image. For you command line nerds you can install any of the fonts listed in Homebrew or use a tool like Embellish to install more fonts.
If you're in developer mode you can bring the monospace fonts back with ujust bluefin-fonts.
We've dropped the GNOME Quick Settings extension for tailscale in favor of the upstream system tray implementation. For more information, check the docs, this requires manual set up.
The tailscale experience is still not where it needs to be, but now that Tailscale has started work on an official system tray implementation we expect this to solidify over the next few upstream releases.
Extinction is a natural part of life. After a deprecation cycle the following images are now removed:
Nvidia Closed Images: Due to Nvidia's software support changes we can no longer support the older closed modules for Nvidia cards. Not many people are using these, either migrate to the nvidia-open images or move to a stock image to use the built in kernel drivers.
Bluefin HWE Images: Not many people were using these, they have also been removed.
As usual most of the changes we do in GitHub to deliver Bluefin and not so much in the image itself. Major parts of the Bluefin repository have been cleaned up to align with the improvements and lessons learned from building Bluefin LTS earlier in the year. This has been the bulk of the work in the past few weeks.
Bluefin has significantly been simplified, now would be a great time to contribute as we've brought the repository up to the state of more modern bootc projects like Bluefin LTS.
bluefin:gts and bluefin:stable will be publishing on Tuesdays from now on instead of Saturdays. Publishing on Saturday nights is an artifact of pre-automation "reserved time" for testing before a weekly release. This matches the same release schedule as Bluefin LTS.
Bluefin is a deinonychus, and may snap at you occasionally. Four year olds can get feisty of so there might be issues that you discover that we haven't seen before. Filing issues is always appreciated.
Sometimes starting in open source can be a real barrier if you don't know where to start. Don't have the skills to do cloud native things yet? Here's a good way to help out FlatHub. Flatpaks rely on what we call "runtimes" to ensure that the application has the dependencies it needs to run. Do a flatpak list to check them out:
This is important work because we want applications to be updated to the latest runtimes for security reasons. As it turns out, many of these applications have OPEN PULL REQUESTS already with people updating the runtime, you just need to find the app, run the updated version by following the instructions, and then report back to the Flatpak maintainer that the new app is working great (or broken!). Since GNOME 49 just released, there's plenty to do, so feel free to dive in and get started! Also remember, this work helps all of FlatHub, we're explictly sending new volunteers to help upstream.
FlatHub is critical to the desktop
We choose to help move application development forward via FlatHub instead of fragmenting the ecosystem with distribution-specific packaging. This includes shipping a premier FlatHub experience out of the box. You do not have to worry about misconfigured and low-quality Fedora flatpak remotes and packages on Bluefin systems.
Find your favorite app and see if there's a test build available for a new runtime. And if you have the skills to port applications to new runtimes, now is the time to flex. 😄
Nothing makes ops people happier than uneventful things.
Today is really like any other, we just updated a few tags, you always have the option to go to any version we support at any time. Wether you like the chill vibe of bluefin:gts or the refined aggresiveness of bluefin:stable , the raptor abides.
Here's the current lay of the land:
gts (default)
stable or stable-daily
latest
Fedora Version:
42
42
43
GNOME Version:
48
48
49
Target User:
Most users
Enthusiasts
Advanced users and testers
System Updates:
Weekly
Weekly or Daily
Daily
Application Updates:
Twice a Day
Twice a Day
Twice a Day
Kernel:
Gated
Gated
Ungated
NOTE: The stable and stable-daily branches will move to F43 in two weeks.
Bluefin is an active predator and is constantly hungry. You can help keep Bluefin healthy by becoming a contributor! We are an open source project and accept contributions:
Let's take a look at our contributor health, and celebrate the amazing folks who have come together to bring you Bluefin! We use LFX Insights to measure our project health. First note that my results here are skewed, since I am either usually just merging or telling a bot it's ok to do something. This also does not include the rest of Universal Blue. Yes, Aurora people basically maintain both, haha.
This next one surprised me, I was expecting 20 or 30ish at best. Nice work ya'll!
Haha yep, I can't hide from the data though, free me from this!
Feel free to browse around and learn cool things about Bluefin's creators.
After KubeCon we head into the holidays, where things will slow down significantly. We've been in the lab with mad doctor Timothée Ravier and have been cooking up something. We expect that this will change the course of Bluefin for the better, forever. We can't wait to show you, until then, enjoy!
I was thrilled at the opportunity to team up with Pragyan Poudal from Red Hat to showcase Bootc along with Bluefin's vision for desktop Linux to a packed house at IndiaFOSS 2025 in Bangalore this past weekend. I managed to make only a handful of Linux users mad. It was a great chance to spread the word about image-based bliss.
After nine months of development Bluefin LTS and Bluefin GDX are now Generally Available(GA). The reign of Achillobator has begun. Find the download links on the website, or snag them below.
Bluefin LTS is a workstation designed for people who prefer Long Term Support but desire a modern desktop. This species of raptor is for users who prefer a slower release cadence, about a three-to-five year lifespan on a single release. Like other Bluefins it features first-class support for Flathub via Bazaar, Homebrew, ZFS, and all the other goodies.
Bluefin LTS is composed of:
Mostly the same packages of Bluefin and Bluefin GTS, but built with CentOS Stream 10 and EPEL for extra packages.
The same features since they share the same source RPMs, just built on CentOS
A backported GNOME 48 desktop
ARM (aarch64) based images
Bluefin LTS also offers a hardware enablement branch (bluefin:lts-hwe) with:
Bluefin LTS ships with Linux 6.12.0, which is the kernel for the lifetime of release. An optional hwe branch with new kernels is available, offering the same modern kernel you'll find in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. Both vanilla and HWE ISOs are available, and you can always choose to switch back and forth after installation.
I have been dogfooding Bluefin LTS for most of this year. This is the most "work focused" image and is suitable for "set it and forget it" style desktops. We are proud of this one!
Bluefin LTS provides a backported GNOME desktop so that you are not left behind. This is an important thing for us. James has been diligenlty working on GNOME backports with the upstream CentOS community, and we feel bringing modern GNOME desktops to an LTS makes sense. I may be old but I'm not dead!
A very special thanks to Jordan Petridis from GNOME for technical advice and review.
Installation is via a live session with the new Anaconda webui. This installer is miles better than the ones we used to ship, thanks to the Anaconda team.
Bluefin GDX is designed to be an AI Workstation by providng Nvidia drivers and CUDA in one image. It combines Bluefin LTS with the Bluefin Developer Experience. There's no cool expansion of GDX: GPU Developer Experience I guess. Maybe someday we'll call it Bluefin CUDA Edition. (Jensen call me!)
The reason we brand it differently is that it is designed for AI and Machine Learning professionals. Instead of a multitude of Nvidia images like Bluefin we will concentrate on this one image to focus on one thing: this is our platform for open source AI. Improvements made in GDX will make it's way into Bluefin's developer mode. GDX gives us a place to rev fast with some new friends:
Teamwork ...
We are happy to announce that we've formed a community partnership with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Command Line Assistant team. We are collaborating on upstream and open source AI and ML tools to provide system-wide inference and an enhanced experience for Bluefin LTS and GDX users.
This will be the lab that will keep Bluefin on the leading edge of open source AI. Here's Mo Duffy on Destination Linux to give you an idea of what we're thinking about.
Nvidia CUDA and VSCode integrations and full secureboot support out of the box. There are many parts of the CUDA ecosystem that need to be included, but the raw core is there and ready to be expanded upon.
Ramalama for local management and serving of AI models
We are looking for AI/ML enthusiasts with strong opinions who want to be involved! Inquire within!
You can find Bluefin GDX on the conference circuit!
What this all means
Bluefin LTS will end up being way more sustainable than Bluefin and Bluefin GTS from a developer perspective. It's more of an initial setup and then we don't touch it as often. We have had periods in beta development where we didn't need to touch it for weeks. If you look changelogs.projectbluefin.io you'll soon notice the pattern, mostly minor version bumps. Nice.
It's also much more advantageous for us to derive off of a base image that ends up being a commercial product -- there is no doubt that CentOS and Red Hat have their weight behind these base images, whereas we are unable to get that level of commitment from Fedora. And as Steven Rosenberg pointed out, Fedora isn't really improving in this area, and with bootc's composefs work coming along nicely we now have multiple base images to choose from. It will be an interesting year!
As it turns out, Bluefin LTS HWE is in the exact same ecological niche as GTS. They will end up being competitors. There's no death knell or anything like that, once development moves on it doesn't cost us much to keep it running. And we do love our pets. Check out the awesome brand new image by Delphic Melody and ahmedadan:
As you can see, it's getting a bit crowded. We'll see how people react to LTS, and I expect we'd hide the GTS option from the website but continue to offer it.
With bootc we can deliver a desktop experience with the latest GNOME, and a new kernel -- but on a solid base with less regressions. The previous generation of thinking kept CentOS in a very locked set of use cases. The old boring ones. Now with bootc + containers + flathub + homebrew, we feel that this less churny base makes for a compelling desktop. We'll see how they compete!
Since Bluefin LTS is "bootc natural" and not a transplant, it comes with less compromises out of the box. Bluefin LTS doesn't support local layering at all and AppImages don't work either. (Told ya'll those things were not gonna make it lol.) Bluefin LTS also does not support older machines with v2 CPU instructions.
This also lets us be less strict in Bluefin. We've decided to leave local layering enabled by default in Bluefin and Bluefin GTS. There are users who use that ecosystem, so no worries there. Savages. The Fedora based images will continue to serve these use cases. James also has his own tunaOS, which offers a wide variety of Bluefin-derived variants, including an AlmaLinux based sister to Bluefin LTS. That covers just about everybody - The bootc community around CentOS is quite diverse, and offers a variety of options.
The downloads page is looking pretty good these days but I am very interested to see what you decide since we do measure everything, so feel free to peruse that list. 😄
Merch
Now let's get on to the good stuff. store.projectbluefin.io will take you to the new Bluefin store, which has a ton of awesome items!
We celebrate this release with this T-shirt, the "Reign of Achillobator", signifying Bluefin LTS's role in this ecosystem as a top predator, along with some other goodies:
And of course we've got stuff for the kids, and some other weird things! Currently this store is US only for now.
Proceeds from the store items will go towards paying for more paleoartwork. I think this is a fair deal, Bluefin would have never gotten this far without the work of these fine artists. Having a way for the community to sponsor the artwork in return for the awesome comfort of an Achillobator giganticus hoodie? Peak Linux.
Special Thanks
Bluefin is brought to you by Tulip Blossom and James Reilly. The team grew this cycle with some fantastic new folks helping out to finish Bluefin LTS:
Special thanks to Carl George, Laura Santamaria, Shaun McCance, and the entire bootc team for their (continuing) support of this project! The game has started. The clue is: Gardener
The Road Ahead
And lastly, there is some missing functionality compared to the Fedora build as there are some creature comforts that are missing. We call these parity bugs, so if find them, file them. There are some things that won't be coming with; CentOS Stream's focus is on long term support, so we may choose to drop a feature if it's not straightforward to bring to Bluefin LTS.
Imagine choosing between LTS, GTS, and stable with just a slider on an update page in a control panel. They should feel and act the same as each other. I'm pretty much there with my personal machines, sometimes I have to check which machine is which because it doesn't really matter. I feel the pain on the infrastructure side instead. 😄
Today we're happy to announce that Bluefin was one of the 71 projects selected for Github's Secure Open Source Fund. We applied for and were selected earlier this year, with tulilirockz representing the team and working with GitHub -- getting some awesome training and some funding to work on improving our security posture. Also awesome to see CNCF Projects like bootc and fluxcd. We're in excellent company. 😄
This has led to us publishing our SBOMs and in general giving everything a once over. p5 also dove in to ensure we're rocking and rolling to secure our supply chain. Though we still depend on many third party sources for our software, we've severely cut that down, bringing things inhouse when necessary or removing a dependency alltogether. Thanks to p5's automation work the project is constantly rebuilding when there's a new base image, ensuring that you're getting those timely security updates!
This was also a good time for us to work with Alan Pope and the rest of the crew at Anchore. The team deployed Syft across our important repos and got to work.
This work is of course, always ongoing. I am still green in this field myself, if you're looking to learn more start here with the OpenSSF
This is a Linux Foundation effort to measure something near and dear to our hearts: contributor metrics. I work with many tools at the CNCF. You will find tools we depend on, like bootc and Podman. This lets us measure contributor health not just for ourselves, but to see how we're doing when compared to other projects. No more guessing, now we can look.
Whew! Ok, that's always good. Let's drill right to the red parts because that's the interesting part.
Here's where we need to use our brains. Charts by themselves can be misleading. Our names are missing (caching issue, probably), but it's clear that I am doing a ton of work! Too much!
What this doesn't show you is that 95% of the work I do on Bluefin is telling a bot it's ok to do something. My takeaway here is "we need to automate more things" because in an ideal world, it's the bots and automation humming away quietly. But ... the chart is also not lying, we are top-heavy for sure, no doubt. We also ensure we measure things outside of code:
If all you do is file an issue or start a discussion, then I do owe you a thanks; we couldn't do it without you.
We've been getting new pull requests in for folks - our way to improve is to continue to work on getting people contributing. LFX Insights is open source and contains some of the largest projects in the world. The fact that we can be involved with this is awesome, and you can submit OSS projects! Stick everything in there, and let's see who is working on improving. 😄
This is just coming live for us, if you're a chart nerd, then feel free to dive into LFX and get started, the team is responsive and moving fast. And if you're like me, you'll find yourself fixing up your dashboard. Make yourself look spectacular! You'll be seeing these charts featured more on the website, etc. Enjoy!
This month Jacob Schnurr takes us back to the Cretaceous. A herd of Dreadnoughtus schrani lumber on their way to their nesting grounds as three Nyctosaurus gracilis lazily fly overhead.
You will receive these in your next update over the weekend.
You may have noticed the new changelogs, which publish weekly when the new images are released.
We're still working on it so there's some improvements to be made, as well as some DNS work to finish it off, but we're pretty happy with it.
Bluefin LTS and GDX are nearing the home stretch, with the GNOME48 backport completed and the kernel policy set. It will ship with the stock CentOS kernel, 6.12.0, which will receive updates and backports throughout its lifecycle.
The hwe stream will be opt in with a ujust rebase-helper, which will bring in a new kernel. This stream is intended for people who need fresh kernels for new hardware. We will not be producing ISOs for these, but will likely do so in the future.
The default filesystem across the board will be XFS.
Hoping to add ZFS over the weekend.
ask.projectbluefin.io is working well with Dosu, we're still tweaking it but it's at least better than most web searches and almost any reddit post, so we're going to keep that around for people who want to use it. It's always linked from the docs, look for "Ask Bluefin" on the top left of this site.
Bazaar continues to improve, things are mostly settled. We fixed the MIME types for flatpakref files so that should be good to go. We're mostly waiting on this to come to Flathub so we can add it to Bluefin LTS, the team is helping out with that process.
