Bluefin Autumn 2025: We visit the 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.
Introduction
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:
- GNOME 48 release notes
- Fedora 42 release notes
- Bluefin changelog - detailed changes
What is Bluefin?
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:
| Version | GPU | Download | Checksum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluefin GTS | AMD/Intel | 📥 bluefin-gts-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
| Bluefin GTS | Nvidia | 📥 bluefin-nvidia-open-gts-x86_64.iso | 🔐 Verify |
Welcome to Bluefin
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!
Major Changes
There are a few major changes from a Bluefin perspective that we've been looking forward to:
Installation Experience
- The Anaconda web-ui installer is now the default installer, dramatically improving the experience. We say goodbye to the old GTK Anaconda installer.
- We'll be automatically refreshing all the Bluefin ISOs once a month to ensure the installation media is fresh.
Introducing Bazaar
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!
We're committed to a future where authors deliver their applications how they see fit. This should be decoupled from the operating system.
Homebrew
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!
Fonts
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.
Tailscale
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.
- Linux systray application - these docs will get your tailscale icon going in your tray.
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.
ujust commands returning
After a hiatus we've finally refactored the Homebrew management in Bluefin. We're adding back some convenience commands:
- AI & Machine Learning Tools: run
ujust bluefin-aito install them.- Learn more in the AI and Machine Learning documentation.
- Kubernetes Tools: Run
ujust bluefin-k8sto install them.- For a full list of the tools, check out the Kubernetes documentation.
- Developer Fonts: Run
ujust bluefin-fontsto install them.- See the full list of fonts in the Fonts documentation.
Removal Notices
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-openimages 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.
Repository Changes
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:gtsandbluefin:stablewill 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.
More Information
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.
We also accept donations to sponsor the infrastructure and artwork.
Helping FlatHub
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:
Flatpak Tracker is a site we made that will check all of the applications we ship in Bluefin and see which runtimes need to be updated. We label them by image, here's the the list of applications that need to be updated.
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.
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. 😄
store.projectbluefin.io
Check out store.projectbluefin.io and pick up some dino merch. Thanks to John Johnson for ensuring our coffee mug game is up to snuff:
Is that it?
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.
Desktop DevOps folks wanted!
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:
As a cloud native project we are always looking for contributors with skills in Podman, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and good ole bash.
Bring on the Charts!
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.
What's Next?
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!