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.
Achillobator giganticus
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:
Bluefin LTS also offers a hardware enablement branch (bluefin:lts-hwe) with:
ujust rebase-helper.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 on my Framework 13 and my Framework Desktop. This is the most "work focused" image and is suitable for "set it and forget it" style desktops. We are proud of this one!
Here's how I pitched the idea earlier this year:
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.
Secure boot and all those goodies are available:
Updates will come as often as we need them for now and will settle into weekly releases on Tuesdays. Follow updates on changelogs.projectbluefin.io.
There are a few lingering issues that will take more time:
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:
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.
You can find Bluefin GDX on the conference circuit!
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. 😄
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.
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:
Yulian Kuncheff (Daegalus) hopped in to help with the GitHub actions and the lts-hwe branch. Ahmed Adan and M. Gopal (Delphic Melody) round out the new team with fantastic work on the artwork, website, documentation, and testing. And don't forget to check out the new coloring book!
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
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. 😄
Two new soundtracks accompany this release, enjoy!
Remember you cannot rebase between CentOS and Fedora Bluefins, ain't no one testing that. Beware. Also this is the new installer -- you'll love it.
The long term support experience.
📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences. Choose HWE for Framework Computers or if you just want newer kernels.
| Version | GPU | Download | Checksum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluefin LTS | AMD/Intel | 📥 bluefin-lts-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS | ARM (aarch64) | 📥 bluefin-lts-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS HWE | AMD/Intel | 📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin LTS HWE | ARM (aarch64) | 📥 bluefin-lts-hwe-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
The AI workstation with Nvidia and CUDA.
📖 Read the documentation to learn about features and differences.
| Version | GPU | Download | Checksum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluefin GDX | AMD/Intel + Nvidia | 📥 bluefin-gdx-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin GDX | ARM (aarch64) + Nvidia | 📥 bluefin-gdx-lts-aarch64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
Only one more day until Bluefin LTS, here's a wonderful gift from Delphic Melody to keep you occupied:
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
A nice milestone for us today! Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, and Cayo are now listed in LFX Insights.
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.
Let's see how we're doing ...
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.
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.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.
You may have noticed this on the docs header lately:
We are using deepwiki to index the documentation and then provide a chat tool for you. For example you can ask it How do I update Bluefin? and so on.
I've been playing with it enough that we've decided to just make it live at ask.projectbluefin.io. Enjoy!
Alright, this tool just added linux support like three weeks ago, so when I saw it I had to call dibs. the / search is awesome, and you can do full package management. You have just leveled up your TUI game. 😈
This is landing in Bluefin this week, if you want it now:
brew install Valkyrie00/homebrew-bbrew/bbrew
bbrew
A little over four years ago some of my fellow ex-Ubuntu friends helped me complete the first prototype for Bluefin. It was our pocket vision of a "what if we could start over and make exactly what we want?". For you archaeologists, here's the first version.
Technically a day early but we intend to make this a weekend long celebration. Eighteen months later we would form a community ... Universal Blue, with the goal to provide modern Linux operating systems for the next generation of open source users and contributors.
Now we have Bazzite, Aurora, and Cayo. Finally, the tools to make our own fate. 😈 I don't have anything especially insightful to say other than thanks! Let's take a quick look at where we stand:
We're sitting at about ~25,000 weekly checkins of Universal Blue systems, and now that we have sort of functional installers, who knows how fast we can grow!
As Kyle mentioned in the Bazzite update our communities continute to grow as well! We're now well over 30 million pulls of our images (we kind of stopped counting that). Here's the contributor stats:
Here's our rolling totals:
And as we can see, the amount of contributions since Bazzite started to gain traction has really improved. I'm particularly proud of our contributor distribution here - it proves that non-code contributions around support can help keep our project healthy:
(This chart is measuring the partial month of July, ignore that drop off we're not collapsing. 😃 )
You have my thanks, you've made my operating system invisible, it has been a pleasure destroying the Linux desktop with you. 💙
Today is also Bluefin's fourth birthday. I suppose as the first product she was the one who would push the hardest, and will always strive for the pure bootc experience. The dinosaurs remind us that we need to force change in order to achieve the best possible desktop we can. Here's a peek at something special:
I was unfortunately unable to find out the lifespan of a Deinonychus, so we'll have to just roll with it.
Things are pretty calm right now, Bazaar is in and once that gets put into Flathub we can chill more. There's plenty of folks on what we call "chillops": they rotate out and relax while the automation hums along for a while.
But also now is the time when the new folks start to step up, so it's encouraging to see people come in and drive for a while. Bluefin LTS is looking pretty good, probably on track for fall GA but we're not in a rush. Next major effort will be adding F43 as beta channels and cycling back into release mode. The game has not started. The clue is: Winnower
This work wouldn't be possible without Timothée Ravier and the bootc team! You have our thanks.
This month we return to our pleasant July savannah, our first ever dinosaur wallpaper! There will be a brand new one for August, so enjoy the serene pastures while you can. Today is all about ISOs:
We've refreshed all of the ISOs, Anaconda and Readymade, you can always find them on the website and the download page:
https://docs.projectbluefin.io/downloads/
The build went pretty smooth, we'll likely turn these on to automatically refresh every month or so.
This is also the first time that Bazaar is shipping on our installation media, we hope that exposing application donation pages and download metrics will help encourage folks to donate to the apps they love!
Support the work here: https://ko-fi.com/kolunmi
We have a working Flatpak and hope to submit to Flathub soon so everyone can enjoy! This thing is so fast I am never giving this app up, it's become a necessary part of my kit!
This is the latest weekly snapshot, hope you enjoy! Note to you Bluefin GTS users that you're still stuck with the old installer and old software store, but at least you'll get it all when it's mostly finished. 😃