We've created a new repository to make it much easier to add Homebrew to your custom bootc images. @ublue-os/brew repository provides a pre-packaged OCI container image that bundles everything you need to add Homebrew to your custom image-based systems. This is an evolution of a long journey to integrate homebrew better onto our Linux systems. Instead of manually setting up Homebrew, configuring services, and managing shell integrations, you can now include everything with a single line in your Containerfile.

COPY --from=ghcr.io/ublue-os/brew:latest /system_files /

On first boot, the brew-setup.service automatically extracts Homebrew to /var/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew, sets up proper permissions, and makes it ready to use. The image also includes timers for automatic updates and upgrades, keeping your Homebrew installation current.

This removes a bunch of the manual stuff you had to do in your template to get the full thing, now it's much easier and reliable for everyone. Once we're done the container will rebuild after a Homebrew release, keeping us up to date and safe!

Check out the repository at github.com/ublue-os/brew for more information and examples.

Thanks!​

This work and testing brought to you by:

Discussions​

Working with artists can be fun because they all move at different schedules so sometimes when it rains it pours.

We're excited to announce two beautiful new wallpapers: Andy Frazer's latest creation Huntress, and a festive holiday wallpaper from Aurora.

Huntress by Andy Frazer (Dragons of Wales)​

Original Bluefin artist Andy Frazer returns with Huntress, a stunning new addition to our wallpaper collection. Following his previous work on Dusk, Andy continues to bring his distinctive paleoart style to Bluefin. We were going for a more weathered Bluefin this time around. No longer the ideal one perched on a rock ... this one has been through some things.

Andy's books make excellent gifts for dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Check out his Etsy shop for his full collection of paleoart books and prints.

Holiday Blues by Chandeleer​

This next one is by Chandeleer and captures all of the mascots from Aurora, Bazzite, and Bluefin playing in the snow.

If you enjoy Chandeleer's work, please consider supporting them through their Ko-fi page.

How to Install​

These wallpapers are available through the @ublue-os/homebrew tap. We've finally solved the teething problems with the tap and we now consider it production ready. You can install them using ujust bbrew and selecting the artwork option: (this is broken right now sorry). We do not yet ship these by default so right now they are opt in:

Installing Bluefin Wallpapers Extra​

To get the Huntress wallpaper and other extra Bluefin wallpapers:

brew install ublue-os/tap/bluefin-wallpapers-extra

And for the Aurora artwork:

brew install ublue-os/tap/aurora-wallpapers

Download Directly​

You can also grab these wallpapers directly from the artwork repository:

• Huntress
• Holiday Blues

Happy holidays from the Bluefin team!

Discussion​

We've added two pages of documentation today:

Driver Versions Page​

Regressions suck. And it also sucks finding out where they happened, especially with the power of bootc switch available! What good is a switch if you don't know where to switch to! I hate looking this up by hand, so we whipped this up:

The Driver Versions page tracks kernel, NVIDIA driver, and Mesa versions across all Bluefin release channels. This consolidated view makes it straightforward to:

• Troubleshoot driver-specific issues - If a recent update broke something, you can identify exactly which driver version changed
• Switch to specific versions - Each release links directly to the GitHub release notes and includes bootc switch commands
• Compare channels - See how stable, GTS, and LTS differ in driver versions at a glance

The page includes direct links to upstream release notes for NVIDIA drivers and Mesa, so you can dig into the details when needed.

Improved Extensions Section​

The Tips and Tricks page has a new refreshed look with extension thumbnails. We haven't touched these in a while, but the reason I was there was to add Copyous to our list of recommended extensions. This thing is so good! It puts a strip of clipboard items on the top that you can summon:

Kick the tyres and let us know what you think!

Discussions​

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Tunnell to discuss Aurora, Bazzite, Bluefin, cloud-native Linux desktops, and the future of the project.

Check out TuxDigital and This Week in Linux.

Discussions​

Flatpak support in Brewfiles is here! You can now manage your Flatpak applications alongside your Homebrew formulae, casks, and other dependencies in a single Brewfile. This is thanks to the amazing work by Ahmed Adan (Donate), who worked with upstream to land this feature.

What's New​

Homebrew Bundle now supports Flatpak packages on Linux. This means you can declare your Flatpak applications in your Brewfile and have them installed automatically with brew bundle.

Note from Jorge: I haven't played with this feature yet but announcing it so we can get feedback right away.

Basic Usage​

Add Flatpak packages to your Brewfile using the flatpak directive:

# Brewfile
brew "neovim"
flatpak "com.spotify.Client"
flatpak "com.visualstudio.code"

Then run:

brew bundle

Remote Support​

Homebrew Bundle supports three ways to interact with Flatpak remotes:

Default Remote (Flathub)​

For packages from Flathub (the default), just specify the app ID. Most of us will use it this way:

flatpak "com.spotify.Client"

URL Remote​

For packages from other repositories, specify the remote URL:

flatpak "org.godotengine.Godot", remote: "https://dl.flathub.org/beta-repo/"

Named Remote with URL​

For shared remotes that you want to reuse across multiple packages:

flatpak "org.godotengine.Godot", remote: "flathub-beta", url: "https://dl.flathub.org/beta-repo/"
flatpak "io.github.dvlv.boxbuddyrs", remote: "flathub-beta"

Commands​

All the standard brew bundle commands work with Flatpak:

• brew bundle - Install Flatpak packages from your Brewfile
• brew bundle dump - Export your installed Flatpak packages to a Brewfile
• brew bundle cleanup - Remove Flatpak packages not in your Brewfile
• brew bundle check - Verify all Flatpak packages are installed
• brew bundle list --flatpak - List Flatpak packages in your Brewfile

Check out the brew bundle documentation for more information.

Dump Options​

# Include Flatpak packages when dumping (default on Linux)
brew bundle dump

# Exclude Flatpak packages
brew bundle dump --no-flatpak

# List only Flatpak packages
brew bundle list --flatpak

Why This Matters for Bluefin​

This feature allows Bluefin users to maintain a single Brewfile that manages:

• Command-line and GUI applications in one file
• Lightweight gitops between all of your machines
• Paves the wave for better Homebrew/Flatpak integration

The huge community benefit is the shareability of a list-o-files. You can give your friend the hookup, and in fact many of Bluefin's "features" are just us shipping our own Brewfiles. For you experts out there this likely just simplifies something you probably already have. And for those of you just starting your command line spec tree it's a nice milestone to hit: "I can get a new install up and running in 10 minutes". There's lots of ways to do this, but this is an easy one. 😄

Woo! We feel that this is a nice complement to devcontainers, providing even more flexibility to your workflows!

How does it work in practice?​

You're going to have to tell me, I am on holiday in the German countryside, but this feature is super exciting and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Refer to the Homebrew Bundle documentation for more!

References​

• Pull Request: Add Flatpak support to brew bundle
• Issue: Feature Request - Add Flatpak support to Brewfile

Also Check Out​

Speaking about "Easiest way to get a clean install in 10 minutes", SaveDesktop is the nice GUI way to do this. You'll always find it in Bluefin's Curated section in the Bazaar app store. (Tell your friends!)

Discussion​

Happy Thanksgiving for those of you in the US eating dinosaurs! Today I am happy to show off some of the recent collaboration we've been doing with some awesome paleoartists. We've covered this before but now the collection is complete!

Natalia Jagielska​

Our newest collaboration is with Dr. Natalia Jagielska, a world renowned expert paleontologist and paleoartist! I've always been a huge fan of her art style and she has graciously given us three wonderful pieces of art. The first you probably already recognize since it's been the wallpaper of the month for November, entitled Collapse:

The second is an homage to Ubuntu's famous Hardy Heron wallpaper, originally designed by Ken Wimer. This one is a mashup of one Natalia's pterosaurs in place of the heron. This one is called Tenacious Pterosaur.

And lastly we have Prey, starring a hungry Venetoraptor gassenae, which is a pterosaur ancestor from the Triassic. This one surprised me, I thought it was a mammal at first!

Natalia's artwork was vectorized and remastered by Delphic Melody, please consider donating so that the collaboration can continue!

Andy Frazer (Dragons of Wales)​

Original Bluefin artist Andy Frazer returns with Dusk. I love this one.

Also Andy is working on another Bluefin for us, which I haven't seen yet. I can't wait to find out! Andy also has a 25% off special on all his books. I have a few of these and they are not only awesome to own but make great gifts as well.

How to get them​

This is not yet included by default so you can hop in early with a ujust bbrew and select artwork. In the future this will be automated for you:

bluefin-wallpapers-extra will bring this collection in. Also you will notice that the Aurora and Bazzite artwork collections are available. This tap is distro agnostic so go nuts putting dinosaurs, cone people, and mechs everywhere!

You can also just grab them from the repository if you prefer to do it that way. Stay tuned for a special holiday wallpaper, coming soon!

Discussion​

Greetings guardians!

A few minor updates today, you'll receive these updates either today or tomorrow depending on the build you're on. Our first is some updates to our usage of just. Just is a task runner that we use to ship community aliases. Our justfiles are ancient, some going back to the beginning of the project. We are consolidating most parts of what you call "Bluefin" into a common repository. These are all mostly scripts, there's nothing distribution specific about them.

We wanted to centralize this because keeping Bluefin and Bluefin LTS configs in sync is too problematic. In this manner we can make the Bluefin parts easily plop onto any image no matter what the image is.

It also means we cleaned out some broken stuff, and are down to just 34 just recipes, which makes all of this sustainable, especially since we're sharing the maintenance with Aurora. All the recipes now include confirmation dialogs and have been refined. I am glad we got this done because this part of Bluefin was really starting to show its age! Thanks to @tullilirockz for working on this! Thanks to @hanthor for implementing it in Bluefin LTS! Run ujust or ujust --choose to get started!

Bold Brew and Brewfiles​

We now have a nice way for the community to contribute to Bluefin's Brewfiles.

We workshopped some ideas on how to make this nicer for users. We approached bold-brew with the idea of presenting Brewfiles to users in a dedicated view. Vito was very accomodating and implemented the idea, kudos to him! Now let me show you how it works:

ujust bbrew is the entry point, we will generate a little menu for you for every Brewfile in Bluefin. So if we add more they just show up here. Then after you choose one bbrew will open up showing you that Brewfile. You can then select and choose what you want to install, or hit Ctrl-A to grab everything.

Bold Brew is to Homebrew what Bazaar is to Flathub​

This is awesome because we can now curate app bundles of CLI tools to users. We're starting off with AI tools, k8s tools, and monospace fonts. Feel free to send PRs to these Brewfiles, since users can pick and choose we can ship the tools you depend on the most. You'll also notice some color improvements in bbrew, make sure you check out the repo and give them a star!

More Cloud Mumbo Jumbo​

And lastly, we now have ujust cncf, which will show you all of the projects that are part of the CNCF. Many of you work with these tools every day, the hope is to show you all of the cool things you can play with in cloud native!

More Consistent Bluefin​

Ultimately this consolidation of all of our config will lead to better Bluefins and has been a primary source of parity issues between Bluefin and Bluefin LTS. Bluefin continutes to actively shrink over time!

We still have work to do, like the motd, bling, and all that other stuff but we'll keep you up to date!

Discussion​

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-daily.

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.

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:

Current Bluefin (November 2025)​

This has resulted in confusion, especially as Bluefin LTS has come up to speed. So starting in the Spring of 2026 we're moving to this layout:

Future Bluefin (Spring 2026)​

Changes and Rationale​

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.

Benefits​

For You​

• Less confusion, you either download Bluefin or Bluefin LTS.
• Better testing in general as we add tests to each step before promotion
• TLDR: Everyone moves to bluefin:stable in the Spring, and those of you who want newer stuff can opt into testing and next

For Us​

• 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.

Discussions and Questions​

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.

Discussion​

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.

Expect it to land in next week's build, enjoy!

Discussion​